Build Your Own VA Claim System

Veteran Claim System Run your own VA claim Free

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Before we continue, submit an Intent to File

It takes 10 minutes on VA.gov and it's free. It locks your effective date for 12 months, so every week you spend gathering records and getting diagnosed still counts toward your back pay. If you skip it, you're paid from the day you finally submit your claim, which is how veterans lose months of money without ever knowing it.

Do it now, then come back. Submit an Intent to File ›

Nobody can promise you
a rating

I paid about seven thousand dollars. Here's what was actually worth it

$4,882.50 Legal consultant Five separate invoices. It never felt like five thousand dollars until I added it up.

~$2,000 Medical opinions Nexus letters and DBQs. Real medical work from real doctors. Worth it.

$0 What finally worked Reading my own records. Knowing what each rating actually requires.

The expensive part wasn't the part that worked. Nobody ever taught me how any of it functioned, so when my claim stalled, I was right back to having no idea why.

Why this exists

Video coming soon

I served in the Marine Corps from 2008 to 2013. Years later I decided to look into the VA claim system, and I had no idea what I was doing. So I did what most veterans do. I hired a consultant, paid a lot of money, and handed the whole thing over and hoped. It got me some results. Not what I was looking for. And I never learned a thing about how the process actually works.

What I eventually understood was that the missing piece wasn't more money or a better advocate. It was that no record existed of what my life actually looked like day to day. Thirteen years of avoiding doctors, and a long list of problems I'd quietly accepted as just getting older. Nobody had ever asked me about any of it, because nobody had the time.

So I built a system that reads every page of my records, asks me about everything, and shows me the actual regulation behind every rating. It found the path. It also flagged health problems I'd been ignoring that had nothing to do with a rating at all.

Why claims stall

The evidence that decides your rating is the part nobody wrote down

Your rating depends on things nobody ever writes down.

How often it happens
How bad it gets
What you've stopped being able to do

None of that is in your file and it's usually not in your doctor's notes. After 15 years it may not even be in your own memory, because you stopped noticing. You said it was normal because you're getting older.

None of that comes out in a one hour appointment. It comes out when you finally get asked about all of it, question by question, by something that has already read every page of your record.

Setting up

This runs on an AI assistant. Here's how to set one up

The whole system lives inside Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. If you've never used one of those, this section is all you need. It takes about ten minutes and you do it once.

1Pick One and Open It on a Computer, Not Your Phone

Go to claude.ai, chatgpt.com, or gemini.google.com in a normal web browser on a laptop or desktop. Any of the three works, and the desktop apps are fine too. Don't use the phone app. Phone versions can chat, but they can't hold a project together across months or manage a folder of your records, and this runs for a long time.

2Create a "Project" Inside It, in Regular Claude or Regular ChatGPT

There's no special mode, no separate app, and nothing to install. It's the same website you'd use to ask any question. Look for Projects in the left sidebar and make a new one called something like "My VA Claim." A Project is just a container holding your files, your history, and the instructions it works from. Without one, every conversation starts from nothing and you'll re-explain yourself for months. Gemini calls its version a Gem. Menus move around, so if you can't find it, ask the assistant "where do I create a Project?" and it will walk you through it.

3Upload the File and Send One Message

Download the file below and upload it into your Project. Then type exactly this: "Follow the instructions in this file." That is the entire setup. You don't have to open the file, edit it, or fill anything in. It will ask you about your service a few questions at a time. From there it builds its own filing system and does the organizing itself.

4Come Back to that Same Project Every Time

Don't start a fresh chat somewhere else. Open the Project and it will tell you where you left off and what to do next. You can walk away for a month and pick up exactly where you stopped.

The most private option, and the one I use

Keep Your Records on Your Own Machine

Everything above uploads your documents to a company's servers. There is a better way if privacy matters to you. Some versions of these tools read files directly off your own computer, so your records are never uploaded anywhere at all. They stay in a folder you control, and the assistant works from them in place.

That also makes the redaction real. Instead of asking you to black things out before uploading, it can strip your identifiers into clean working copies and analyze only those, while the originals never move.

Claude Code. Runs from a terminal, and comes with a paid Claude plan. Not hard once it's set up, but it does look like a command line, so it helps to be comfortable with that. This is what I use.
Claude Cowork. Friendlier, no terminal. Currently Mac-only and needs a higher subscription tier, running about $100 to $200 a month, so it's a real cost to weigh.

The system works fine without either of these, and most people will start in a browser. But if you'd rather your medical records never leave your computer, this is how.

The flow

Eleven Stages

Your assistant runs these in order. Every single reply it gives you ends with one next step, never a list and never a menu. You don't have to know VA terminology or what comes after this.

1 Protect Your DateIntent to File, ten minutes
2 Privacy SetupBefore anything is read
3 Build The SystemProject and regulations
4 EligibilityEra and exposures
5 Gather RecordsSlowest requests first
6 Read EverythingEvery page, not summaries
7 The Questionnaire153 questions, plus yours
8 The MapEvery claim, every gap
9 Get DiagnosedThe words for your doctor
10 Medical EvidenceNexus letters and DBQs
11 File And TrackYou file it, knowing why

Get the File

Everything is in one text file. Download it, upload it to Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini, and send this one message:

Follow the instructions in this file.

Download the file

That's everything you need to start. The two sections below are the same content split in half, if you'd rather read the guide on its own.

Part 1: Orientation The guide, written for you. Process, red flags, glossary, privacy. Download
Part 2: Setup prompt The instructions, written for your AI. You don't need to read it. Download

What you get

Not a Chatbot That Guesses

The Regulations, Quoted

It downloads the actual federal rating schedule and quotes it, rather than somebody's summary of what a rating requires.

Rating Math That's Correct

Combined ratings aren't addition. At 90%, a new 30% rating moves you about three points. Know that before you chase one.

A Gap Analysis Per Condition

The criteria for the next bracket, what you currently meet, and the one piece of evidence that would close it.

A Questionnaire From Your Chart

Built after reading your records, so it asks about what you've normalized and about findings nobody followed up on.

Health Flags, First

The same reading finds things that need a doctor for your health, not your rating. It's told to raise those ahead of any claim analysis.

Protection Clocks

When each rating stabilizes at five years, when service connection locks at ten, and when the rating locks for life at twenty.

The details

The parts you'll want before you start

Which AI Do I Need?

Whichever you already have. Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini all clear the bar. It's a text file, not an app, and nobody here is paid to recommend one. What matters is that your tool can:

Read a lot of documents completely. Records run to hundreds of pages. This is the requirement that separates them most.
Remember your project between sessions. This runs for months, so look for a "Projects" feature.
Fetch a web address. The government source for the rating schedule is already written into the prompt.
Run code, so combined ratings are computed rather than estimated.
Give you files back, like the questionnaire and your tracking documents.

⚠️ Free tiers are where you'll hit a wall. Some cap you at a few document uploads per day. Workable, just slower.

What Happens to My Medical Records?

Nobody here ever sees them. There's no account, no upload to this site, no server on our end. You're working in your own AI account, with documents that already belong to you. Whatever happens to your records is between you and the tool you choose, which is why it's worth choosing deliberately.

The most protective setup is an assistant that reads files off your own computer. Your records stay on your machine and are never uploaded anywhere. That's a property of how those tools work, not a promise anyone has to keep.

If you upload to a cloud service instead, that service has received your documents. Nothing can un-send them. That's the honest tradeoff for the convenience, and it's worth knowing before your first upload rather than after.

The setup prompt tells your assistant to strip identifiers from working copies and to keep your name, Social Security number, file number, and address out of anything it generates. Understand what that is: an instruction, not a guarantee. These systems usually follow instructions and sometimes don't. So the real protection is you. Read anything before you submit or share it, and check your identifiers aren't sitting in it.

Where Do the Rules and Ratings Come From?

Nothing here is anyone's interpretation. Every criterion your assistant quotes is downloaded verbatim from the government's own published regulations, and you can read the same sources yourself.

eCFR, Title 38	The complete rating schedule. Part 4 is what conditions are rated under. Part 3 covers service connection and how ratings become permanent.
govinfo, GPO	The Government Publishing Office's official copy, as PDFs. First fallback.
Cornell Law	A long-running mirror from Cornell Law School. Often easiest to read on a phone.
Board decisions	Every past Board of Veterans' Appeals decision, searchable. Useful for seeing how criteria get applied.

Your assistant tries all three regulation sources in order and verifies that what it downloaded is actually the regulation, because a page can return "success" and contain nothing. If every route fails it's told to stop and ask you to upload the page rather than quote something it couldn't read. If it ever tells you what a rating requires without showing you the text, push back.

What This Is Not

Not legal advice, and not a representative. An AI can't represent you, and no one can promise a rating or a faster claim.
Not a way to get a rating you don't deserve. It's built the opposite way, to catch invented findings and overstated symptoms before they reach VA. One fabricated detail can cost you credibility on every legitimate condition in your file.
Not something that files for you. Everything gets your own eyes first. If a generated statement says something you don't recognize as true about your life, it doesn't go in.
Not finished in a weekend. Testing gets scheduled, records take months, diagnoses take appointments. This is a system for a process that runs in years.

Veteran Claim System, build your own VA claim system