Why Is Your VA Disability Rated at 0 Percent?

A 0 percent VA rating means the VA has agreed your medical condition was caused, or made worse, by your time in the military (what the VA calls service connection), but it found your symptoms too mild, on the day you were examined, to cross the payment threshold in its own rating schedule. Your decision letter says "service-connected" on one line and "0%" on the next, and no monthly check follows either one. That combination frustrates a lot of veterans, and on August 20, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit shut down one route some veterans have tried in response: arguing in court that a 0 percent rating is unlawful because it exists at all. In Gordon v. Collins, the court held that neither it nor the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims below has authority to decide that question, confirming a rule it set in 2015. A 0 percent rating is not the end of the story. It just means the fight has to happen on different ground: the facts of your condition, not the structure of the rating system itself.

What Does "Service-Connected but Noncompensable" Actually Mean?

Service connection is the VA's legal conclusion that a current disability is linked to an injury, disease, or event that happened during active duty, or was caused or worsened by it. It is a separate question from severity. The VA can and does grant service connection for a condition and then rate that condition at 0 percent, meaning it is real, it is on your record, and it still pays nothing.

The regulation that creates this outcome is short. 38 C.F.R. §4.31, titled "Zero percent evaluations," states: "In every instance where the schedule does not provide a zero percent evaluation for a diagnostic code, a zero percent evaluation shall be assigned when the requirements for a compensable evaluation are not met." In plain terms: if your symptoms don't reach the lowest paying tier for that condition, the VA still records a rating, and that rating is zero.

The rating schedule referenced there is 38 C.F.R. Part 4, the VA's own set of diagnostic codes and criteria for rating hundreds of conditions on a scale from 0 to 100 percent, in 10-point increments. Congress gave the VA that authority in 38 U.S.C. §1155, which directs the Secretary to build a schedule with exactly ten paying grades: 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100 percent.

Several common conditions land at 0 percent routinely, according to the schedule itself. Hearing loss is rated under 38 C.F.R. §4.85, using Table VI and Table VII under diagnostic code 6100 to translate audiometric test results into a percentage; Table VII shows that many combinations of test results, even ones a veteran experiences as real hearing loss, produce a 0 percent outcome. Skin conditions rated under 38 C.F.R. §4.118 include several codes with an explicit 0 percent tier: vitiligo with no exposed areas affected, superficial acne of any extent, and scarring alopecia affecting less than 20 percent of the scalp all rate at 0 percent under that section. Limited joint motion works the same way. Under 38 C.F.R. §4.71a, forearm flexion limited only to 110 degrees rates at 0 percent, and limitation of motion in the ring or little finger rates at 0 percent regardless of degree. None of these are errors. They are the schedule working as written.

Why Does the VA Rate Some Conditions at Zero Percent?

The rating schedule is built around average impairment in earning capacity, not around whether a condition is medically real. A diagnostic code sets thresholds, such as a certain range of motion lost, a certain size of scar, or a certain degree of hearing loss, and everything below that threshold gets 0 percent rather than no rating at all. The VA typically measures those thresholds using a Compensation and Pension exam, usually called a C&P exam: a medical evaluation, performed by either a VA provider or a VA contract provider, where an examiner records findings against the specific criteria in the diagnostic code that applies to your condition. If the numbers from that exam fall short of the lowest paying tier, the rating comes back at zero.

This is also why the same condition can be 0 percent for one veteran and 30 percent for another. Two people can both have service-connected tinnitus, both have service-connected scars, or both have service-connected limited motion in a joint, and still get different ratings, because the rating tracks the measured severity on the day of the exam, not the diagnosis by itself.

Is a 0 Percent Rating Worth Anything at All?

Yes, even though no check comes with it. Service connection, once granted, is generally established for good. If your condition worsens later, you file a claim for an increased rating, not a new claim to prove the condition is connected to your service all over again. That link is already on record. You are only proving that your symptoms have gotten worse, which is a narrower and often faster fight than the one you already won.

A service-connected rating, including a 0 percent one, can also affect eligibility for VA health care and where you land in VA's priority group system, which may affect how soon you're enrolled and how much, if anything, you pay toward care. The details of that system, and which priority group applies to a noncompensable rating versus a compensable one, change over time and depend on your income and other factors, so check the current rules directly at va.gov/health-care/eligibility before relying on any specific number.

A 0 percent rating on file is also protection against a much harder fight later. If the VA has already conceded your condition is connected to your service, a future increase claim starts from that settled point. Without it, a veteran filing years later for a worsened condition has to prove service connection and current severity at the same time.

Can Multiple 0 Percent Ratings Add Up to Something?

Sometimes, under a narrow regulation most veterans never hear about. 38 C.F.R. §3.324, "Multiple noncompensable service-connected disabilities," provides: "Whenever a veteran is suffering from two or more separate permanent service-connected disabilities of such character as clearly to interfere with normal employability, even though none of the disabilities may be of compensable degree under the . . . Schedule for Rating Disabilities the rating agency is authorized to apply a 10-percent rating, but not in combination with any other rating."

That is a specific and fairly demanding standard. It requires two or more separate, permanent, service-connected conditions, each individually rated at 0 percent, that together "clearly interfere with normal employability." That phrase is a lower bar than being unemployable, but it still requires a real showing, not just the fact that you have more than one 0 percent rating on paper. The regulation also limits what it can do: the 10 percent it authorizes cannot be combined with any other rating, so it is a floor for a veteran whose ratings are all noncompensable, not an extra 10 percent added on top of a rating you already have. It is not applied automatically. If you believe it fits your situation, it needs to be raised explicitly, with evidence connecting your combined conditions to your ability to work.

What Can You Actually Do About a 0 Percent Rating?

Several paths exist, and all of them work with the rating system rather than against its structure.

• File a claim for an increased rating if your condition has gotten worse since your last decision. The VA will typically schedule a new C&P exam and measure your current symptoms against the same diagnostic code criteria that produced your 0 percent rating.
• Raise a problem with the exam itself. If the C&P exam that led to your 0 percent rating missed something, such as the wrong test being used, the examiner not asking about flare-ups, or symptoms going undocumented, that is a factual and evidentiary problem with your specific case, not a challenge to the rating schedule. It is exactly the kind of issue a Higher-Level Review or Board appeal exists to catch.
• Use one of VA's three decision-review options. A Supplemental Claim lets you submit new and relevant evidence the VA didn't have when it made the original decision. A Higher-Level Review asks a more senior VA reviewer to take a fresh look at the same evidence already in your file, without adding new evidence. A Board Appeal sends your case to a Veterans Law Judge at the Board of Veterans' Appeals. Details and current processing times for each are at va.gov/decision-reviews.
• Watch the clock. For a Higher-Level Review or a Board Appeal, VA generally requires you to file within 1 year of the date on your decision letter. A Supplemental Claim can technically be filed later, but VA recommends filing within that same 1-year window to protect your original effective date. Confirm current deadlines at va.gov before filing, since these rules can change.
• Get help from someone authorized to give it. An accredited Veterans Service Organization representative, claims agent, or attorney can help build the record for a claim or appeal, often at no cost through a VSO. VA's accreditation search tool at va.gov/ogc/apps/accreditation lets you confirm whether a specific person or organization is currently authorized to represent veterans before VA.

Why Can't You Just Sue Over a 0 Percent Rating?

This is the question the Federal Circuit answered in Gordon v. Collins, and the answer is jurisdictional, not substantive: it's not that the court looked at the argument and disagreed. It's that neither the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims nor the Federal Circuit is allowed to hear it at all.

Vaughn Gordon served in the Army as a medical lab specialist in 1968. He filed a claim for service-connected bilateral hearing loss in 2013, and in December 2021 the VA granted service connection but assigned a 0 percent rating. The Board of Veterans' Appeals denied him a compensable initial rating in 2023. On appeal, Gordon argued that by rating a service-connected disability at 0 percent, the VA was effectively creating an unlawful "eleventh grade of disability" beyond the ten paying grades Congress described in §1155, and that §1110's promise to pay compensation for a service-connected disability meant a 0 percent rating could never be lawful.

Both courts said they could not decide that question, because Congress carved it out of their jurisdiction. 38 U.S.C. §7252(b) bars the Veterans Court from reviewing "the schedule of ratings for disabilities adopted under section 1155 . . . or any action of the Secretary in adopting or revising that schedule," and 38 U.S.C. §7292(a) bars the Federal Circuit from reviewing the same thing on appeal. The Federal Circuit had already interpreted those statutes in Wingard v. McDonald, a 2015 case involving a veteran's 0 percent rating for a service-connected hernia, holding that §7252(b) "squarely precludes the Veterans Court from determining whether the schedule, by including a 0% rating, substantively violates statutory constraints." In Gordon, the Federal Circuit found Gordon's question identical to the one it had already refused to review in Wingard, wrote that it was "bound" by that earlier decision, and dismissed the appeal for lack of jurisdiction. Gordon pointed to a later Federal Circuit case, Frazier v. McDonough, where the court did reach that same argument and rejected it on the merits. The panel answered that Frazier arrived in a different procedural posture, and that when two of its precedential decisions are in tension, the earlier one controls.

Gordon can still ask the Federal Circuit to rehear the case, and Congress can always rewrite the statutes that built the bar. But the panel's own framing of the case matters: Judge Stoll opened the opinion by writing that the case "reemphasizes both our jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims." This is not a new rule. It is the Federal Circuit confirming, more than a decade after Wingard, that the door to challenging the existence of the 0 percent rating in court has been closed since 2015 and stays closed. That is exactly why the paths described above (a claim for increase, a decision review, a challenge to a specific exam) matter more than a lawsuit over the rating schedule itself. They are the routes Congress actually left open.

This article is general legal information, not legal advice, and VA regulations and rating criteria are updated over time, so confirm current rules at va.gov and ecfr.gov before you rely on them. You can read the full Gordon v. Collins opinion directly from the court at cafc.uscourts.gov.