PTSD VA Ratings: What Moves You Up a Level

The VA doesn’t rate PTSD by how traumatic the event was. It rates how much your symptoms get in the way of work and relationships today, using the General Rating Formula for Mental Disorders (38 CFR 4.130, diagnostic code 9411).

A useful way to read the levels:

• 30%: you mostly function, but symptoms like poor sleep, anxiety or occasional panic cut into your efficiency.
• 50%: symptoms make you less reliable and productive: trouble with memory, motivation, or keeping relationships at work and home.
• 70%: deficiencies in most areas of life, such as near-constant depression or panic, anger that boils over, or not being able to keep close relationships.
• 100%: total impairment in both work and social life.

The symptom lists in the regulation are examples. Missing a listed symptom doesn’t cap your rating, and symptoms that aren’t listed still count.

Beyond a current PTSD diagnosis and a medical link, the VA needs evidence that the in-service stressor occurred. How hard that is depends on the stressor:

• Combat: your own account can be enough if it fits the circumstances of your service.
• Fear of hostile military or terrorist activity: your account can be enough if a VA or VA-contracted psychologist or psychiatrist confirms the stressor supports the diagnosis. This covers many deployments where you were under threat without direct combat.
• Military sexual trauma or personal assault: evidence from outside your service records counts. See our MST guide.
• Accidents and training incidents: records, buddy statements and unit histories help corroborate them.

Many North Dakota Guard members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Deployment orders and unit records can help place you where the stressor happened.

All mental health diagnoses share one rating, so depression or anxiety alongside PTSD won’t be rated separately. But physical conditions caused or worsened by PTSD can be:

• Sleep apnea, often argued through medication-related weight gain
• High blood pressure
• GERD or IBS
• Erectile dysfunction from PTSD medications, which also qualifies for SMC-K
• Migraines

Your exam may be at the Fargo VA Medical Center, with a contracted examiner closer to home, or by telehealth, which can help a lot if you’re in Williston or Dickinson.

• Write it down beforehand: symptoms, how often they happen, and the worst recent episodes. It’s hard to remember everything in a stressful appointment.
• Talk about function, not just feelings: missed shifts, jobs you’ve lost, how you get along with family, whether you avoid people or places.
• Bring a statement from your spouse or a close friend. They see things you don’t.