Yes, the VA can lower a disability rating. It cannot do it on a hunch, on a differently worded exam, or without telling you first. A reduction has to clear a proof requirement that applies from the first day you hold a rating, then a notice process with two separate 60-day periods, and then, depending on how long you have held the rating, protections at five, ten and twenty years. This guide lays out each rule with the regulation that controls it, shows the calendar of a reduction with real dates, and covers what to do when the VA skips a step, which its own Inspector General found happens often.
A companion video overview. The guide below goes further, with a primary-source citation for every rule it states.
Reduction and severance are two different actions
Two things can happen to a service-connected condition, and the rules for each are different. A reduction lowers the percentage: the condition stays service connected, it is just rated as less disabling. A severance removes service connection itself, so the condition stops being compensable at all. People use "they took my rating" for both, and the difference matters because the protections below attach to one or the other.
A lower percentage that lowers your payment. The VA prepares a rating proposing the reduction, setting out all material facts and reasons, and the notice process below applies before anything changes.
Service connection removed. Allowed only where the evidence establishes the grant was clearly and unmistakably erroneous, with the burden of proof on the government. A change in diagnosis can be the basis only if a physician certifies that the original diagnosis was clearly erroneous in light of all the accumulated evidence, with a summary of the facts and reasons.
What the VA has to prove, from day one
A common belief is that a rating is unprotected until it has been in place for five years. It is not. Four sections of the rating schedule apply to every reduction, whatever the percentage and however long you have held it, and together they set the bar.
A new examiner writing up the same knee in different language is not an improvement. Neither is a shorter or less careful exam. The regulation runs in both directions: an actual change, for better or worse.
- The whole history, not one report. 38 CFR § 4.1 requires each disability to be viewed in relation to its history. 38 CFR § 4.2 makes it the rating specialist's job to read exam reports in light of the whole recorded history, and to send a report back as inadequate if a diagnosis is not supported by the findings or the report lacks detail.
- Judged working, not resting. § 4.2 says each disability must be considered from the point of view of the veteran working or seeking work. § 4.10 bases evaluations on the ability to function under the ordinary conditions of daily life including employment, and notes that a person may be too disabled to work while up and about and fairly comfortable at home.
- The burden is the VA's. The Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims put it plainly, as quoted by the Board: the veteran need not demonstrate entitlement to retain the higher rating; it must be shown by a preponderance of the evidence that the reduction was warranted (Kitchens v. Brown, 7 Vet. App. 320 (1995)).
- Improvement in real life. In Brown v. Brown, 5 Vet. App. 413, 421 (1993), the court held that in any rating-reduction case it must be determined not only that an improvement actually occurred but that it actually reflects an improvement in the veteran's ability to function under the ordinary conditions of life and work.
The proposal, and the two 60-day clocks
When a reduction would lower the money you are being paid, the VA cannot simply issue a smaller deposit. 38 CFR § 3.103(b)(2) bars reducing or otherwise adversely affecting an award of compensation until you have been notified and given 60 days to submit evidence. The short list of situations where the VA may act without that advance notice in § 3.103(b)(3) is built around information you supplied about income, net worth or dependents, a missing eligibility report, death, renouncement, active service pay and garnishment orders. A medical reduction is not on it.
A proposal, not a decision. Sent to your latest address of record with detailed reasons. The VA's own manual directs that the proposing rating decision cite all the material facts and justification and give you the proposed evaluations and the combined evaluation.
The manual's checklist for a sufficient due process letter, as quoted by the VA Inspector General, includes the proposed decision with proposed rates of payment, the proposed effective date, information about a possible overpayment, detailed reasons, and your right to present evidence, request a personal hearing and have representation.
Evidence that your payment should continue at its present level. Treatment records, a private medical opinion, statements about how the condition affects work and daily life: anything that shows the claimed improvement did not happen or does not hold under ordinary conditions.
Ask inside 30 days and your payment holds. A predetermination hearing request received within 30 days of the notice keeps benefit payments at the previously established level until a final determination. You are told the time and place at least 10 days ahead, and the hearing is held by VA personnel who did not take part in the proposal.
Skip the hearing, or miss it without good cause, and the final action rests on the evidence of record alone (§ 3.105(i)(2)).
A written notice with reasons and evidence. The final action is issued to you and your representative, setting out the reasons and the evidence it rests on.
A second 60 days, then the end of that month. The reduction takes effect on the last day of the month in which a 60-day period from the notice of the final decision expires. The statute states the same rule for a change in physical condition.
When a rating drops with no proposal at all
Veterans sometimes open a decision and find one condition rated lower with no warning letter ever sent. That can be correct. The proposal process in § 3.105(e) is triggered by a lower evaluation that would reduce the payments being made. The VA's manual (M21-1 X.ii.4.B.1.d) tells staff that when one or more individual evaluations decrease but the combined evaluation stays the same, they take no further award action and notify you of the change. The same applies when another condition goes up enough to raise the combined evaluation.
You are told, but there is no 60-day window, because your payment does not change. Do not ignore it. The lower individual rating is what gets combined the next time anything in your file changes.
The final letter is not the end
Between the final decision and the effective date there is a gap of two months or more, and evidence still counts inside it. M21-1 X.ii.4.B.2.h covers evidence received after the final rating decision but before the reduction takes effect. If that evidence convinces the VA a reexamination is needed, staff prepare an amended award that continues the rate previously in effect. If the VA decides to restore the prior evaluation, staff prepare an amended award that cancels the scheduled reduction. A specialist's report that arrives in July, in the calendar above, is not too late.
The protections that grow with time
Three time-based rules sit on top of everything above. They protect different things, and mixing them up is the most expensive mistake in this area.
A rating held at the same level five years or more gets the stability rules of 38 CFR § 3.344.
Raises the bar for a reduction. Does not forbid one.
Service connection in effect ten years or more is not severed except for fraud or a service or discharge problem shown in military records (§ 3.957).
Protects the connection, not the percentage.
A disability continuously rated at or above an evaluation for twenty years or more is not reduced below it, except on a showing of fraud (§ 3.951(b)).
Protects the level itself.
Five years: sustained improvement, under ordinary conditions
38 CFR § 3.344(c) applies paragraphs (a) and (b) to ratings that have continued at the same level for five years or more. What they add:
- No reduction on one exam for conditions that come and go. Conditions subject to temporary or episodic improvement will not be reduced on any one examination unless all the evidence clearly shows sustained improvement. The regulation's own examples include epilepsy, bronchial asthma, gastric or duodenal ulcer, arteriosclerotic heart disease, psychoneurotic reaction and many skin diseases.
- Improvement that will last. Even where material improvement is clear, the VA must consider whether it is reasonably certain the improvement will be maintained under the ordinary conditions of life.
- A thinner exam cannot be the basis. Examinations less full and complete than the ones on which payments were authorized or continued will not be used as a basis of reduction, and the entire record of examinations and the medical-industrial history must be reviewed.
- Doubt keeps the rating. If doubt remains, the rating is continued in effect pending a reexamination, with the VA deciding whether 18, 24 or 30 months pass first (§ 3.344(b)).
For a rating held under five years, or a condition that has not stabilized and is likely to improve, § 3.344(c) says a reexamination showing improvement will warrant reduction. The day-one requirements of §§ 4.1, 4.2, 4.10 and 4.13 still apply either way.
Ten years: the connection, not the number
38 CFR § 3.957 and the statute behind it, 38 U.S.C. § 1159, bar severing service connection that has been in effect ten or more years, except where the original grant was based on fraud or military records clearly show the person lacked the required service or character of discharge. The ten years run from the effective date of the service connection finding to the effective date of the severance, and the protection extends to dependency and indemnity compensation claims.
Read what it does not say. A condition protected by the ten-year rule can still have its percentage reduced under the ordinary rules. What it cannot lose is its status as service connected.
Twenty years: the floor
38 CFR § 3.951(b), carrying out 38 U.S.C. § 110, protects a disability continuously rated at or above an evaluation for twenty or more years: it will not be reduced to less than that evaluation except on a showing that the rating was based on fraud. The twenty years are computed from the effective date of the evaluation to the effective date of the reduction.
Two practical points follow. The protection is at or above a level, so a rating that has been 50 percent for twelve years and 70 percent for eight has twenty years at or above 50, not at 70. And because the count runs to the effective date of the reduction, the months a proposal spends in process can carry a rating past the line.
Reexaminations: when the VA can look at all
Most reductions start with a reexamination. 38 CFR § 3.327(a) lets the VA request one whenever it needs to verify the continued existence or current severity of a disability, and you are required to report. When a reexamination is in order, § 3.327(b)(1) schedules it not less than two and not more than five years out, in the rating board's judgment.
§ 3.327(b)(2) lists six situations where periodic future examinations are generally not requested:
- Static disabilities. The condition is established as static.
- Five years unchanged. Findings and symptoms have persisted without material improvement for five years or more.
- Permanent conditions. The disability is permanent in character with no likelihood of improvement.
- Veterans over 55. Except under unusual circumstances.
- Minimum ratings. The condition is at a prescribed scheduled minimum rating.
- No effect on the combined rating. A reduction in the condition would not affect the combined evaluation.
Those six are guidelines. § 3.327(a) says they do not limit the VA's authority to request a reexamination at any time. That is why the so-called 55 year rule is not a protection against reduction: it tells the VA when routine callbacks are generally unnecessary, not what it may never do.
If you miss the reexamination
A missed exam does not cost you the rating that day. 38 CFR § 3.655 turns on good cause, which includes illness or hospitalization and the death of an immediate family member, and that list is not closed.
- A pretermination notice comes first. On a running award, § 3.655(c)(1) requires a notice giving the prospective date of discontinuance or reduction, the reason, and your procedural and appellate rights, with 60 days to say you will report or to send evidence.
- Say you will report and the adjustment waits. If you tell the VA you are willing to report before payment is cut, the action to adjust payment is deferred and the exam is rescheduled (§ 3.655(c)(3)).
- A hearing request within 30 days also defers it under § 3.105(i)(1). Requested later, the reduction takes effect as proposed (§ 3.655(c)(4)).
- Protected ratings drop to the floor, not to zero. Where there is a minimum evaluation or a rating protected under § 3.951(b), payment is reduced to that lower evaluation instead of discontinued.
Does a reduction leave you owing money?
Usually not. The effective date rules above set the reduction forward, at the end of a month after the second 60-day period, so a properly processed reduction for improvement does not reach back into months already paid. A debt arises on the other tracks: a VA error, fraud, or a missed-exam discontinuance under § 3.655 that runs from an earlier date.
If a debt notice does arrive:
- Ask for a waiver within one year. Under 38 CFR § 1.963(a), recovery shall be waived if there is no indication of fraud, misrepresentation or bad faith and collecting would be against equity and good conscience. The request must be made within one year of the notice of indebtedness.
- Know what equity and good conscience means. § 1.965(a) lists the elements: fault of the debtor, balancing of faults between you and the VA, undue hardship, whether collection would defeat the purpose of the benefit, unjust enrichment, and changing position to your detriment.
- You can do more than one thing at once. § 1.911(c) lets you dispute the existence or amount of the debt, request a waiver, ask for a hearing on the waiver, and appeal the decision that created the debt, separately or at the same time.
When the VA breaks its own rules
Every rule above assumes the VA follows it. The VA Office of Inspector General checked. In Report 25-01011-154 (August 31, 2026), it reviewed proposed adverse actions on service-connected compensation closed during 2024, a population of about 27,100 records, and estimated that one or more errors occurred in about 9,300 of them, about 34 percent. That is a processing error rate, covering underpayments as well as overpayments, not a rate at which reductions are overturned.
About 4,000. The OIG called these adverse actions premature. The fix is a corrected due process letter and an additional 65 days before the final decision.
About 2,900.
About 2,900.
About 1,000. Some cases carried more than one error, so the categories add up to more than 9,300.
The report estimated at least $16.9 million in improper payments across about 4,000 of the error cases, with $964,000 a month continuing until the errors are fixed. One case it described shows how a letter goes wrong: a heart condition was proposed to drop from 100 percent to 10 percent because of a clear and unmistakable error, but the letter told the veteran the reason was improvement. The veteran was underpaid about $26,600 across 2024 and 2025 and will keep being underpaid about $2,200 a month until proper due process is issued. The OIG also found that when a due process letter leaves out a required element, it is insufficient, and staff must send a corrected letter and restart the due process period.
The remedy is not a partial correction or a compromise percentage. The cut is treated as if it never happened.
Board of Veterans' Appeals decisions show it applied. In one 2016 decision (Citation Nr. 1631977), a reduction for major depressive disorder from 100 percent to 50 percent was found improper and the 100 percent restored back to the date the cut took effect, because the record showed no reexamination demonstrating improvement and no finding of clear error in the original rating. In a 2018 decision (Citation Nr. 1817664), a reduction to 20 percent was held void ab initio for failure to make the required findings, and restoration of the 30 percent rating was granted from the date of the cut forward. In both, the veteran won on procedure, not on a medical argument.
Choosing a review lane
An error already visible in the record. Request within one year of the decision. An experienced adjudicator who did not take part in the prior decision reviews it, and the record is limited to the evidence as of that decision, with no new evidence considered.
A letter missing a required element, a wrong effective date, findings never made: these are errors on the face of the file, which is the job higher-level review is built for.
You have new evidence. Can be filed at any time after the decision.
Review by the Board of Veterans' Appeals. Also within one year of the decision. While one review is pending you cannot file a different option on the same issue (§ 3.2500(b)).
Total ratings and TDIU run on stricter rules
Two kinds of rating carry extra requirements. A total rating will not be reduced, absent clear error, without an examination showing material improvement, weighed with particular attention to whether you improved while working or actively seeking work (38 CFR § 3.343(a)). A rating based on individual unemployability can be reduced only on clear and convincing evidence of actual employability (§ 3.343(c)(1)), and not merely for holding a substantially gainful job unless you keep it for 12 consecutive months (§ 3.343(c)(2)). The court has held that actual employment is not synonymous with actual employability (Faust v. West, 13 Vet. App. 342, 350 (2000)).
The full rules are in TDIU: Paid at 100% Without a 100% Rating, Working With a VA Rating and VA 100% P&T: What a Total Rating Unlocks.
Four beliefs that cost veterans money
Filing does not lower anything by itself. A new claim can lead to a new exam, but any reduction still needs an actual change shown against your whole history (§§ 4.1, 4.2, 4.13), the proposal and 60-day process (§ 3.105(e)), and it still runs into every time-based protection you have earned. The risk is a real improvement the exam documents, not the act of asking. See How to Increase Your Rating.
§ 3.344's added protections start at five years, but §§ 4.1, 4.2, 4.10 and 4.13 apply to every reduction from the first day, and the burden to justify the cut sits with the VA.
It locks service connection (§ 3.957). The percentage is protected at twenty years at or above a level (§ 3.951(b)), and before that by the ordinary proof rules.
Evidence received after the final decision but before the effective date can continue your old rate or cancel the reduction (M21-1 X.ii.4.B.2.h), and a cut that skipped a required step is void and can be challenged afterward.
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Primary federal law, court and Board decisions, and VA's own reports. Rules change; confirm current details at these sources before acting.
- Reduction and severance: 38 CFR § 3.105(d), (e), (i)
- Notice before adverse action, and its exceptions: 38 CFR § 3.103(b)
- Effective date of a reduction: 38 CFR § 3.500(r) · 38 U.S.C. § 5112(b)(6)
- What every reduction must show: 38 CFR § 4.1 · § 4.2 · § 4.10 · § 4.13
- Stabilized ratings: 38 CFR § 3.344
- Total ratings and TDIU: 38 CFR § 3.343 · Faust v. West, 13 Vet. App. 342 (2000)
- The twenty-year and ten-year protections: 38 CFR § 3.951 · 38 U.S.C. § 110 · 38 CFR § 3.957 · 38 U.S.C. § 1159
- Reexaminations and missed exams: 38 CFR § 3.327 · § 3.655
- Debts and waivers: 38 CFR § 1.963 · § 1.965 · § 1.911
- Review options: 38 CFR § 3.2500 · § 3.2601
- The burden, void reductions and restoration, as quoted in Board decisions: Brown v. Brown, 5 Vet. App. 413 (1993); Kitchens v. Brown, 7 Vet. App. 320 (1995); Greyzck v. West, 12 Vet. App. 288 (1999); Schafrath v. Derwinski, 1 Vet. App. 589 (1991) · BVA Citation Nr. 1817664 (2018) · BVA Citation Nr. 1631977 (2016)
- VA's instructions to its staff: M21-1, Part X, Subpart ii, Chapter 4, Section B, Authorization for Reductions in Disability Evaluations Under 38 CFR 3.105(e)
- How often errors occur: VA Office of Inspector General, Report 25-01011-154, Review of VBA's Processing of Adverse Actions for Service-Connected Disability Compensation (August 31, 2026)
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