A veteran rated 100 percent disabled and living alone collects $3,938.58 a month from the VA, and that figure has not moved since the table it comes from took effect on December 1, 2025. Ten months on, every disability compensation check in the country is still calculated from that one page.
Nothing is broken about this. The table is simply waiting on a number that someone else has to publish first, and veterans on fixed incomes are the ones who feel the delay when they try to plan the winter.
What the December 2025 table pays
The VA’s compensation rates page carries an effective date of December 1, 2025 and a last-updated stamp of December 2, 2025. For a veteran with no dependents, the monthly rates read $180.42 at a 10 percent rating, $552.47 at 30 percent, $1,132.90 at 50 percent, $1,808.45 at 70 percent and $3,938.58 at 100 percent.
Read live today, the page shows no table dated December 1, 2026 and no announcement of one. The page also does not name a percentage for the 2026 raise, so the table itself is the only official statement of what the last adjustment produced.
Why a new table cannot appear before Social Security acts
The same page spells out the rule that holds everything up: the VA is “required by law to match the percentage of cost-of-living adjustments made to Social Security benefits.” That makes the Social Security Administration’s announcement the first domino. The SSA’s COLA series page still ends at the 2.8 percent row, with 2.5 percent for 2024 above it and 3.2 percent for 2023 and 8.7 percent for 2022 beneath, and lists no 2027 figure.
Until that row exists, the VA has no percentage to apply. Any figure circulating for a December 1, 2026 rate, whether on a forum, in a video or in a mailer, is a forecast. A hypothetical makes the stakes concrete: if the next adjustment matched the 2.8 percent in the latest SSA row, the 100 percent rate would rise by about $110 a month, and the 10 percent rate by about $5. The actual percentage may differ, and no agency has said which way.
The VA’s press room, current through September 30, tells the same story by omission. Its recent items cover suicide-prevention grants of $112 million, $1.17 billion in homelessness grants and the processing of 3 million disability claims, but not a single line on compensation rates or a cost-of-living figure. The department is not holding a number back. It is waiting on the one that Social Security has yet to release.
The dollar item the VA did put a date on
The VA’s September announcements contain one clear household-dollar story, and it is about insurance, not compensation. In a September 16 release, the department said enrollees in Veterans’ Group Life Insurance will skip premiums for three months, from November 2026 through January 2027. The VA put the total at nearly $150 million across more than 457,000 participants, an average of $110 a month and about $330 per veteran over the holiday.
VA Secretary Doug Collins framed the move as part of making life more affordable for veterans. The holiday applies to the program’s enrollees as the release describes it, and it is unrelated to the compensation table, so it does not substitute for a raise. It does fall in the same winter stretch in which a compensation raise, once announced, would begin to matter to household budgets.
Executive order deadlines with no dollar figures attached
Veterans following the policy side may also have seen Executive Order 14426, signed September 8 and published in the Federal Register September 11. It orders military personnel files to be shared with the VA within 30 days and continuously afterward, and it sets 120- and 180-day deadlines for technology reviews, digital application tools and updates to the Transition Assistance Program. The order is about the speed of claims. It names no dollar amounts and does not touch the rate table.
What stays fixed until the SSA series moves
The sequence for the rest of the year is therefore short and checkable. SSA adds a 2027 row to its series; the VA matches the percentage; a table with a new effective date replaces the one dated December 1, 2025. Each step is visible on a public page, and the two pages cited here are the ones that will show it first. Because each step depends on the one before it, a veteran cannot shorten the wait by calling or writing; the data simply is not there yet. Every compensation amount in force today is therefore computed from the December 2025 table, to the cent. Until then, the amount a veteran at any rating is paid is the amount printed in the December 2025 table.
Disability compensation and VA pension are separate programs
The rate table covers service-connected disability compensation, which turns on a disability rating. VA pension is a different benefit with its own tests, and low-income wartime veterans and surviving spouses sometimes confuse the two when searching for the right form. Veteran-targeted pension scams also trade on that confusion.
The Veterans Benefits Action Kit is a 10-page guide that lays out the three VA pension levels including Aid & Attendance, how to file for free with VA Form 21P-527EZ, the pension-poacher warning signs and a claim tracker.
Sort the three VA pension levels and the 21P-527EZ filing steps →
AI assistance was used in preparing this report; each figure is linked to the VA, SSA or Federal Register page it came from.
