On May 1, 2022, a veteran posted a question in the HadIt community.
VA had proposed rewriting how it rates mental health conditions that February. He’d been reading it. On the surface it looked better for veterans. VA itself said the change “should generally lead to more generous compensation.”
“This sounds good,” he wrote. “But!”
If your medication helps you, he read, VA would count that toward lowering your rating. He asked whether he had it right.
Within a day, the community went to work. A member who relies on workplace accommodations said medication should never be grounds for a lower rating. Another pulled the court decisions that said the same thing. I posted the case file for Jones v. Shinseki. The next day he came back and connected the dots: the proposal was written to get around that case.
He was right.
This is what makes the HadIt community so valuable: each of us, in our own way, informing, questioning, researching, and sharing.
One more thing from that thread. The first reply asked whether he’d shared his concerns during the public comment period. It had closed two weeks before he posted.
The door was already shut.
It took VA almost four more years to try that openly. When it did, in February 2026, veterans buried the rule in 20,000 comments in nine days and VA rescinded it.
It’s still sitting in the rule VA keeps promising to finish.
The rule that keeps not arriving
On February 15, 2022, VA published a proposed rule to rewrite the mental health rating schedule: 87 FR 8498, tracking number RIN 2900-AQ82. You can look it up yourself.
The proposal would scrap the current rating formula and replace it with five areas of functioning: cognition, interpersonal relationships, task completion and life activities, getting around, and self-care. It would kill the 0 percent rating. A service-connected mental health diagnosis would start at 10.
The comment period closed April 18, 2022.
There is still no final rule. The formula a rater applies to you today, at 38 CFR 4.130, is the same one that was in place before any of this started.
VA’s own calendar
Twice a year, every federal agency publishes the Unified Agenda: a public list of the rules it’s working on and when it expects to finish them. It’s a promise in writing.
Here’s what VA promised about this one:
Spring 2022 agenda: final rule by January 2023
Fall 2022 agenda: June 2023
Spring 2023 agenda: March 2024
Fall 2023 agenda: June 2024
Spring 2024 agenda: April 2025
Fall 2024 agenda: August 2025
Spring 2025 agenda: December 2025
Fall 2025 agenda: August 2026
2026 edition, published August 14, 2026: August 2026
Read the last line again.
VA printed an August 2026 deadline in the Federal Register in the middle of August 2026. Then August ended.
Nine deadlines. Zero rules.
If a veteran missed nine deadlines, VA would have closed the claim eight deadlines ago.
In VA’s own words
This isn’t a rule VA considers optional. Its own 2026 agenda entry makes the case better than I can.
The current criteria were adopted in 1996, built on the fourth edition of the psychiatric diagnostic manual. The fifth edition came out in 2013. VA says continuing to rate veterans on the old framework “could be inadequate and in conflict with current scientific knowledge.”
VA classifies the rule as a major rule. It estimates the budgetary impact at $24.5 billion over five years and $62.1 billion over ten, and says the new criteria would “provide more adequate compensation” for veterans with service-connected mental disorders.
Sit with that.
By VA’s own math, veterans are rated on criteria VA calls outdated, under a system VA admits would compensate them more adequately if it ever finished the fix.
VA priced the fix at $62 billion. Then it missed the deadline nine times.
I know how long it takes for the system to believe what doctors already know.
In 1992, my psychiatry team told me they were treating me for PTSD but couldn’t diagnose it under the manual’s definition. In March 1993, my VA psychiatrist put it in writing anyway: PTSD and depression, starting after my treatment in service.
Three months later, VA denied my claim. The reason, in VA’s words: “no evidence to substantiate a rating of PTSD.” Her letter was in the file.
I appealed. The diagnostic manual changed in 1994. VA rebuilt its mental health rating criteria on the new manual in 1996, the same criteria veterans are judged by today. In November 1997, VA reversed itself and granted service connection back to March 1993.
Four years to believe a VA doctor.
PTSD has always been questioned. Every invisible wound is. TBI didn’t get its own detailed rating criteria until October 2008, years into two wars that made it the signature injury.
This time it was the Washington Post, framing the system as overrun with dubious claims and fraud. And Daniel Gade, telling the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee on October 29, 2025, that we are “paying veterans to be sick,” naming PTSD and tinnitus among the conditions “easily exaggerated or totally unverifiable.” Then saying it outright: “PTSD is curable.”
Tell that to the veteran who’s been in treatment since 1992.
VA’s own paperwork says the problem runs the other way.
The clause that came back
The proposal isn’t only a raise.
Buried in it is a note to the new rating formula, Note (2): raters would “include any ameliorating effects of medications” when deciding how disabled you are. VA says in the proposal why it added that note. It was a response to Jones v. Shinseki, the 2012 case where the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims said the Board shouldn’t count medication effects unless the rating criteria clearly said to.
The note was written to say it.
That’s the clause the veteran in our community caught in May 2022. It’s the same principle VA put into an interim final rule on February 17, 2026, across the whole rating schedule, with no advance notice and no chance to comment before it took effect. Veterans filed more than 20,000 comments. VA rescinded it effective February 27. The Federal Circuit dismissed VA’s appeal of Ingram v. Collins in March.
Everybody treated that as over.
For mental health ratings, it isn’t. The medication clause is still written into the pending proposal, and that proposal already went through public comment, back in 2022.
If VA finalizes it as written, the rule veterans killed in February comes back for PTSD, depression, and every other mental health rating. Through a door that’s already open.
It wouldn’t be the first time a cut came in through a side door. In 1998, Congress barred service connection for disabilities tied to tobacco use in service. It did it in a highway bill. That bar is still the law, 38 U.S.C. 1103.
Can VA finalize that note after Ingram without proposing it again? That’s a fight for the lawyers, and I’m not going to pretend to settle it here. But the text is there. It’s VA’s. And nobody has taken it out.
Where the dates go
Every one of those missed deadlines was a real date, printed by VA.
And they get repeated as if they were effective dates.
The pitch runs the same way each time. The ratings are changing soon. Here’s what the new system will pay. Act now. Sometimes it comes attached to a service: claims help for a four-figure fee from someone who isn’t VA-accredited, with a guarantee tied to a rating increase.
VA writes down a target date. Somebody else puts a price on it.
C’mon, man. It’s a f*!king business model.
A proposed rule that never finalizes is a sales event that never has to end. The date slips, the pitch updates, the urgency resets.
Fair enough: a missed date isn’t proof anybody knew it would slip. But nine times running? “It’s about to change” isn’t news. It’s scuttlebutt with a price tag.
We got it wrong too
HadIt repeated those dates.
One article on our main site said the change was “set to take effect in April 2025.” Look back at VA’s calendar: that was VA’s Spring 2024 target, repeated as fact. Another said the mental health changes took effect on May 19, 2024. That was a real date, for a different rule covering the digestive system.
In our community, a guide posted in May 2025 said the changes were “expected to take effect in summer or fall 2025.” That one went up under my name. It also said veterans with current ratings were grandfathered unless they filed a new claim. The proposal has no grandfather clause. The protection comes from federal law, and it works differently than that post said.
All of it is corrected now, with notes that say exactly what we got wrong.
I’m telling you because if a site that’s been checking VA’s claims since 1997 repeated it, it’s reaching a lot of veterans who’ve never had a reason to doubt it.
What you should actually do
Your claim is rated on the rules that exist today. Not the proposal. Read 38 CFR 4.130 next to your records.
Don’t time your claim around a rule that doesn’t exist. Anyone telling you to wait for the change is guessing. Some of them are selling.
File as soon as you decide to file. We’ve said it on HadIt for years, and it holds here. Your effective date generally runs from the day VA receives your claim, and every month earlier is retroactive money in your pocket. Not ready to file everything yet? For a new claim, an intent to file locks in that date for up to a year.
Your current rating is protected by law. Under 38 U.S.C. 1155, a change to the rating schedule can’t reduce a rating already in effect unless VA shows your condition has improved.
Check who’s helping you. Federal law bars anyone who isn’t VA-accredited from acting as your agent or attorney. VA’s accreditation search takes thirty seconds.
For the full walkthrough, see HadIt’s VA Claims Self-Help Guide.
What I’m watching
RIN 2900-AQ82. When a final rule publishes, if it does, I’ll read Note (2) first and tell you what it says. It’s a major rule, so it generally can’t take effect for at least 60 days after it publishes.
Until then, the next time somebody tells you the PTSD ratings are about to change, ask them one question.
Which deadline?
Have you been told your PTSD rating is about to change? Tell me who said it and when.