VA Disability Rates 2027: Projected Pay Chart at a 3.4% COLA

Every October, the Social Security Administration announces a cost-of-living percentage, and within days, veterans start searching for what that number means for their VA disability check. The search usually turns up nothing official, because nothing official exists yet — and the reason isn’t a publishing delay. It’s that the VA raise, unlike the Social Security raise it’s modeled on, has no legal existence until Congress votes for it.

The short answer: at a projected 3.4% cost-of-living adjustment, a veteran rated 100% disabled with no dependents would see monthly compensation rise from $3,938.58 to $4,072.49, and a veteran rated 30% would go from $552.47 to $571.25. But those are projections built on a bill that has not yet become law. Two companion bills, S. 4487 in the Senate and H.R. 8552 in the House, would set the 2027 increase at whatever percentage Social Security receives, effective December 1, 2026. As of late September 2026, both are introduced, not enacted, which is worth understanding before treating any 2027 VA rate as settled.

Why this raise isn’t automatic

Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment runs on autopilot. The formula lives in the statute, the inflation data feeds it every year, and no vote is required for the increase to take effect. VA disability compensation doesn’t work that way, and this is the detail that gets lost in most coverage of veterans’ benefits each fall. Military retired pay works the same way under 10 U.S.C. 1401a, which is why its 2027 raise needs no vote (military retired pay COLA 2027).

Every year, Congress has to pass a standalone bill — typically titled some version of the “Veterans’ Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act” — that directs the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to raise the dollar amounts in title 38. For 2027, that bill exists in two forms moving through the two chambers. S. 4487 was introduced in the Senate on May 11, 2026, by Sen. Jerry Moran, with Sen. Richard Blumenthal and a bipartisan group of cosponsors, and referred to the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. H.R. 8552 was introduced in the House on April 28, 2026. As of late September 2026, both bills are listed as introduced. Neither has passed either chamber.

That is not, on its own, cause for alarm, and last year’s timeline is instructive rather than worrying. The 2026 version, the Veterans’ Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act of 2025 (S. 2392), wasn’t signed into law until November 25, 2025 — just six days before its December 1 effective date. A 2027 version that follows a similar timeline would not, by itself, be a sign that the increase is in danger. The honest framing is simpler: the bill ties the VA raise to whatever Social Security gets, and this page’s numbers assume it is enacted in the form it currently takes. Nothing here should be read as a prediction that it will fail — only as an accurate statement of where the process stands today.

What the bill actually changes

S. 4487’s language is specific about which VA payments move and how the increase is calculated. Effective December 1, 2026, the bill directs the Secretary to increase the dollar amounts in effect on November 30, 2026, across several categories: wartime disability compensation — “each of the dollar amounts under section 1114 of title 38” — additional compensation for dependents under section 1115(1), the clothing allowance under section 1162, dependency and indemnity compensation to surviving spouses under section 1311(a) through (d), and DIC to children under sections 1313(a) and 1314.

Every one of those amounts is tied to the same benchmark. The bill states that each figure “shall be increased by the same percentage as the percentage by which benefit amounts payable under title II of the Social Security Act… are increased effective December 1, 2026.” In other words, VA compensation doesn’t have its own inflation formula at all. It borrows Social Security’s, once Congress votes to apply it. After the increase is calculated, the Secretary is required to publish the new amounts in the Federal Register.

This page focuses narrowly on the section 1114 disability compensation rates — the monthly payment by rating and dependent status. It doesn’t attempt to project the DIC amounts paid to surviving spouses and children or the clothing allowance, beyond noting that the bill raises them by the identical percentage applied to disability compensation. Anyone drawing DIC or a clothing allowance should expect the same percentage increase this page projects for compensation, just against a different base dollar figure.

How this page projects the 2027 numbers

Projecting VA’s rate table before the bill passes and before VA publishes anything requires more than applying a percentage to last year’s numbers — VA’s own table isn’t built that simply, and getting the method wrong produces a chart that looks plausible but doesn’t match how VA actually rounds.

The check comes from working backward through VA’s 2026 table against its 2025 predecessor. The 2026 table is reproduced exactly by taking every 2025 basic rate — the amount for each disability rating and each dependent add-on at the 100% level — and multiplying it by 1.028, the 2026 COLA, rounding to the cent. That step alone reconstructs the “veteran alone” column and the 100%-level dependent add-ons (spouse, each parent, one child, and so on) with no discrepancies.

The dependent add-ons for ratings between 30% and 90%, though, aren’t built the same way. Those follow 38 U.S.C. 1115(2), which sets them “in an amount having the same ratio to the amount specified in paragraph (1) as the degree of disability bears to total disability” — meaning the 100%-level amount multiplied by the rating percentage — and then applies a specific rounding instruction: amounts “if not a multiple of $1, shall be rounded down to the nearest dollar.” Not to the nearest dollar. Down.

A single example shows the mechanism working. At the 100% level, the 2026 spouse add-on is $219.59. At the 50% rating, the same add-on should be half of that: 0.5 × $219.59 = $109.795. Rounded down, that’s $109. Check it against VA’s own published table: the 50%-with-spouse rate is $1,241.90, and the 50%-veteran-alone rate is $1,132.90. The difference is exactly $109. The rounding-down rule, not simple rounding, is what produces that number.

Applied across the full table, this two-step method — apply the COLA to the 100%-level base amounts, then derive every 30%–90% dependent add-on as that base times the rating, rounded down — reproduces 113 of 113 cells in VA’s published 2026 table from the 2025 table, along with the 10% and 20% basic rates, which carry no dependent add-ons at all. That’s every cell with one category of exception, described below. The same method, run forward from the 2026 table at a 3.4% COLA, produces the projected 2027 table in this article.

The exception is the partial “spouse receiving Aid and Attendance” amounts paid at the 30%–90% ratings. VA’s published tables don’t apply the clean rounded-down proportion to those figures the way they do to every other dependent add-on — in the 2026 table, several of them land $1 above what the rounding-down rule alone would predict. Because that irregularity isn’t explained by the statute’s plain text, this page shows those particular 2027 figures as a one-dollar range rather than a single number — for example, $62 or $63 at the 30% rating — rather than presenting false precision. The 100%-level spouse Aid and Attendance amount, by contrast, follows the ordinary COLA-multiplication rule cleanly: $201.41 in 2026 projects to $208.26 at 3.4%.

The 2027 rate tables at a 3.4% COLA

The tables below use 3.4% as the central projection, with the four columns in Table A showing how the “veteran alone” rate moves across the 3.2%–3.5% range this site’s COLA tracker currently considers plausible.

Veteran with no dependents, by COLA scenario

Note that 10% and 20% ratings don’t carry additional amounts for dependents at all — VA pays those two rates the same whether or not a veteran has a spouse, children, or dependent parents.

Rates by dependent status, 30%–60%

The next two tables project every dependent-status row at the 3.4% central COLA scenario, split by rating so the columns stay readable on a phone. Each cell shows the 2027 projection first, with the 2026 official rate in parentheses.

Rates by dependent status, 70%–100%

Additional amounts for children and spouse Aid and Attendance

These are add-ons layered on top of the rates above, not standalone payments. Each additional child under 18 beyond the first, each additional child 18 or older still in school, and a spouse receiving Aid and Attendance each add a further monthly amount, and each is a function of the disability rating.

The spouse Aid and Attendance row carries a one-dollar range at every rating from 30% through 90%, for the reason explained above: VA’s own published tables don’t apply a single clean rounding rule to that particular figure, so this page doesn’t manufacture false precision by picking one number over the other.

Two examples: reading the tables

Numbers in a grid are easier to use with a worked example attached. Take two veterans at opposite ends of the rating scale, both without dependents.

A veteran rated 100% disabled, no dependents, currently receives $3,938.58 a month. At the 3.4% central projection, that becomes $4,072.49 — a gain of $133.91. Across the full band this site is tracking, the same veteran would see $4,064.61 at 3.2% or $4,076.43 at 3.5%, so the range of plausible outcomes for this one rating spans about $12 a month depending on where the September CPI-W data lands.

A veteran rated 30% disabled, no dependents, currently receives $552.47. At 3.4%, that rises to $571.25, a gain of $18.78 — smaller in dollar terms simply because the base payment is smaller, even though the percentage applied is identical.

Dependents complicate the arithmetic in a useful way, because several add-ons stack rather than compound. Consider a veteran rated 70% disabled with a spouse and three children under 18, where the spouse also qualifies for Aid and Attendance — this mirrors an example VA itself has used to illustrate how its table works. In 2026, the base rate for 70% with a spouse and one child is $2,074.45. Add $76 for each of the second and third children under 18, and $141 for the spouse’s Aid and Attendance, and the total comes to $2,367.45. Projected to 2027 at 3.4%, the same components become $2,144.94 for the base rate, $78 for each additional child, and $145 or $146 for the spouse Aid and Attendance add-on — landing the household at $2,445.94 or $2,446.94 a month, an increase of roughly $78.49 to $79.49 over the 2026 figure. The range at the end isn’t a rounding error on this page’s part; it’s the same one-dollar uncertainty in the spouse Aid and Attendance figure carried through to a real household’s total.

When the new rate actually shows up in a bank account

The pending bill sets December 1, 2026, as the effective date for the new rates, and VA pays disability compensation at the start of each month, for the month before. That means the first payment reflecting the 2027 rate is the one VA issues at the beginning of January 2027, since it represents December 2026 — the first month the new rate applies under the bill as written.

This page deliberately doesn’t name a specific calendar date for that payment, because guessing at one would be exactly the kind of unverified figure this site avoids. What is fixed, by the bill’s own language, is the December 1 effective date. What follows from VA’s standard arrears payment structure is that the increase lands in the payment issued at the start of the following month.

Is VA disability compensation taxable?

One thing about this money is settled and doesn’t depend on any pending bill: VA disability compensation is not taxable income for federal purposes. Under 38 U.S.C. 5301, VA benefits are exempt from taxation. That exemption covers the full monthly payment, including every dependent add-on described above, and it doesn’t require any special election or paperwork — the exemption applies automatically to the benefit as VA pays it. It’s a different tax treatment than Social Security benefits receive, where a portion can become taxable depending on a recipient’s combined income; VA compensation carries no equivalent threshold.

What could still change

Two things stand between the numbers on this page and an official 2027 VA disability rate chart, and both have known dates attached. The first is the COLA percentage itself. The Social Security Administration announces the official cost-of-living adjustment around October 14, 2026, once the September Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers is published — the last data point the calculation needs. This site’s Social Security COLA tracker follows that number as new inflation data arrives, and this page will be updated with the exact percentage once it’s announced.

The second is enactment of the bill itself. S. 4487 and H.R. 8552 are both introduced but not yet passed as of late September 2026. Last year’s version wasn’t signed until November 25, 2025, six days before its own effective date, so a late signing this year would not be without precedent. VA’s own official rate chart follows after the act is signed, not before, so a Federal Register notice with confirmed figures should be expected sometime after both the COLA percentage and the bill’s passage are settled. Readers who want the payment-date mechanics behind how a COLA of this kind reaches a bank account, once it’s official, can see how that worked for Social Security’s own 2027 increase in when the first 2027 COLA payment arrives, and what a similar percentage looks like after Medicare’s Part B premium is subtracted in the 2027 COLA net of Medicare.

Sources

• S. 4487, 119th Congress, full text — govinfo.gov/app/details/BILLS-119s4487is
• S. 4487 on Congress.gov — congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/4487
• H.R. 8552, 119th Congress — congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8552
• S. 2392, Veterans’ Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act of 2025 — congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/2392
• VA current disability compensation rates — va.gov/disability/compensation-rates/veteran-rates/
• 38 U.S.C. 1114 — law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/38/1114
• 38 U.S.C. 1115 — law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/38/1115
• 38 U.S.C. 5301 — law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/38/5301
• finbarrow, Social Security COLA 2027 tracker — companion page for the shared COLA percentage