Editorial Standards
You are making decisions about money and medical care. You are entitled to know where every number came from, who wrote it, and what happens when we get something wrong.
Who writes this
Guides and tool pages are published under the Lima Charlie byline — Written by a U.S. military veteran, sourced to the VA’s own rules.
Lima Charlie is written by John, a U.S. military veteran who went through the VA claims process himself — VSO route, then claim sharks, then finally doing it alone with the regulations open — and built this so no veteran leaves money on the table for want of knowing how the system works.
That is the whole masthead. There is no content team, no freelancer pool and no AI churning out pages nobody read — one veteran writes it, and the sources below are how you check the work rather than take his word for it.
What that is not: we are not attorneys, not a VSO, not accredited claims agents, and not affiliated with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Nobody here is a doctor. Lived experience plus documented sources is what we bring; a legal or medical opinion about your specific case is not. More about who we are.
Where the numbers come from
- Compensation ratesReproduced from the VA's published table, currently the rates effective December 1, 2025 and last verified against the source on July 16, 2026. The VA's rate table is the authority; where we ever disagree with it, it is right and we are wrong.
- Rating criteria and combined-rating math38 CFR Part 4 — the rating schedule itself, including §4.25 for combined ratings and §4.26 for the bilateral factor. Our calculator implements those rules rather than approximating them.
- Process, forms and timelinesVA.gov and the VA's own published guidance. Form numbers are given in full so you can check them.
- Secondary-condition linksDocumented medical relationships, each recorded with its rationale rather than asserted. A link in our data means there is a documented basis for the connection — never that your claim will be granted.
Every figure on the site traces to one of those. We do not publish a statistic we cannot source, we do not round numbers to make them sound better, and we do not quote a dollar amount as something you will receive.
What we will not publish
- Predictions about your claim.Only the VA decides ratings and outcomes. Anyone promising you a percentage is guessing or selling.
- Advice about what to claim.We explain how the rules work and what the arithmetic does. What you file is your decision, based on your evidence and your life.
- Proposed rules stated as current ones.The VA proposes changes regularly — to sleep apnea, tinnitus and mental health among others. Proposed is not final, and we label it that way every time.
- Anything we cannot check.Claims that circulate in veteran forums get verified against the regulation before they appear here, and dropped when they do not survive it.
How often this gets re-checked
- Rates: every December.VA compensation follows the Social Security COLA by law, announced in mid-October and effective on 1 December. The rate table is updated then, and every page that quotes a dollar figure computes it from that table rather than storing its own copy — so they cannot fall out of step with each other.
- Guides: on the record, not on a schedule.Every guide shows its last-updated date at the top. When a rule changes, the guides affected are corrected and re-dated.
When we get it wrong
We will. When it happens, the page is corrected rather than quietly deleted, and the updated date changes so you can see it moved.
If you find an error, tell us. The Help & Feedback button in the bottom-right corner of every page sends it straight to the founder, or use the contact page. Corrections from veterans who spotted something are the most valuable messages we get, and they are acted on before anything else in the queue.
The free help we will always point you to
Accredited Veterans Service Officers do this work for free, and they are genuinely good at it. Nothing on this site is a reason not to use one — several of our guides tell you outright when a VSO is the better route. Find an accredited representative at VA.gov.
Educational information only — not legal or medical advice, and not a prediction about your claim. You make every decision and every filing; only the VA decides outcomes.