VA Claims Record-Breaking Claims Processing Time
The Department of Veterans Affairs issued a press release claiming it processed more than 3 million disability compensation and pension claims by mid-September 2026, surpassing its previous annual mark of 3.001 million files set in fiscal year 2025.
VA Claims Record-Breaking Claims Processing Time
Official releases report that benefit distributions exceeded $207 billion during the fiscal year. But can you trust these VA numbers? Some veterans are skeptical given a series of less informative, more “hooray for the VA” type press releases since the start of 2024. What do the numbers say?
Data released by the Veterans Benefits Administration includes average disability claim completion times, which VA says dropped from 141.5 days down to roughly 75 days. The official backlog of claims pending older than 125 days fell by more than 70 percent from peak early-2025 totals.
VA records also claim a 12-month “claims adjudicative accuracy rate” reaching 94 percent. Do these numbers mean anything to the veterans waiting in line to get their claims reviewed?
Government Accountability Office Reports
Government Accountability Office investigations document oversight challenges, contractor payment errors, and quality-review delays that still plague the VA. Part of these issues is beyond the VA’s control; the PACT Act has dramatically increased the number of claims the VA must process.
But not all of the blame can be laid at the feet of federal laws that revise the VA claims process.
According to one GAO report, published in August 2025 by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the VA Medical Disability Examination Office had no formal written procedures to verify contractor performance figures. These procedures are needed to prevent overpayments to medical contractors, which ultimately rob the VA of much-needed funds.
And then there are the manual calculation and spreadsheet errors that caused the VA to incorrectly pay private examination contractors over $2 million during the first quarter of fiscal year 2024 alone.
Has the VA addressed this issue? At press time, the answer is yes, but in a limited way. The GAO still lists the issue as partially “open” at press time, which requires the agency to recalculate historical payments and recover or correct inaccurate payouts made since 2022.
Other federal reports note that the Medical Disability Examination Office failed to maintain its required schedule for evaluating exams in complex clinical categories.
The VA, TBI, and MST
As of July 2025, VA audits covering military sexual trauma (MST), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and Gulf War illness were nine months overdue or remained unscheduled. The Government Accountability Office formally recommended that the Secretary of Veterans Affairs implement formal, written procedures for dealing with VA contractors who provide medical services to veterans.
Specifically, the GAO says, “In September 2025, VBA updated its procedures for performing Special Focused Reviews of contracted exams for complex claims, changing the frequency of reviews for each claim type from every other year to every 3 years.”
The Veteran Benefits Administration now holds “a review for one of the three complex claim types every year, rather than performing reviews for two claim types” in “some years.” This might not mean much to an individual VA benefits applicant, but procedurally, it makes a difference at the VA.
Going Forward
The Government Accountability Office issued other recommendations to improve VA operations and bring true reform to the claims process. Among its many recommendations, the GAO advises:
“The Secretary of VA should direct the agency to conduct “Special Focused Reviews of contracted exams for complex claims (traumatic brain injury, military sexual trauma, and Gulf War Illness) on a biennial basis, in accordance with its procedures.” It directs the VA Secretary to identify and use “a mechanism to collect and address direct feedback from examiners on the quality of exams” given to veterans as part of the claims process.
The GAO also recommends the VA develop “written procedures to validate the accuracy of its financial incentive calculations, including data entry and scoring of performance measures,” when making performance-based payments to medical contractors.
When the VA fully implements these and other GAO-recommended reforms, we may get closer to believing that faster claims processing and greater accuracy are part of the corporate culture at the VA. But the agency has a long way to go.
In conclusion, the VA may be processing claims faster in 2026 than in years past, but many issues and reforms remain to ensure the process serves the veterans it was created to help.
As the GAO notes, VA disability exams and the staff who run them “are a critical source of evidence for determining veterans’ eligibility for compensation for service-connected disabilities.” Any improvements in the process directly benefit the veteran community the VA is meant to serve. Faster claims processing means little if claims must be clawed back and reviewed to correct procedural mistakes after the fact.
>> Frustrated with your VA disability rating? Register for a free consultation for help with increasing your rating to get the compensation you deserve.
About the author
Editor-in-Chief Joe Wallace is a 13-year veteran of the United States Air Force and a former reporter/editor for Air Force Television News and the Pentagon Channel. His freelance work includes contract work for Motorola, VALoans.com, and Credit Karma. He is co-founder of Dim Art House in Springfield, Illinois, and spends his non-writing time as an abstract painter, independent publisher, and occasional filmmaker.
