Rated 0% for a painful joint? VA got about half of these wrong

A 0% rating means VA agrees the joint is service connected but pays nothing for it. For a lot of veterans that's where a bad knee or shoulder has sat for years. The August 2026 report says a big share of those zeros shouldn't be zeros.

What the Inspector General found

The VA Office of Inspector General published report 25-02645-131 on August 6, 2026. It pulled a statistical sample of 100 decisions from April 1, 2024 through March 31, 2025, where VA assigned or kept a 0% rating on a joint. Then it projected the results across all of them.

• About 32,000 of 64,000 decisions were wrong on painful motion. That's 50%.
• About 12,000 of those errors cost veterans money, at least $45 million in underpayments. The other 20,000 didn't change the veteran's combined rating at the time.
• About 19,000 of the wrong decisions had pain documented both ways: what the veteran reported and what the examiner found. None of the 32,000 got a paying rating.
• It kept happening. A second sample of 20 decisions from October and November 2025 showed the same errors.

One case from the report shows how it plays out. A veteran asked for an increase on a left knee. The examiner wrote down the veteran's pain when walking and also found pain with repeated use. VA left it at 0% and never addressed the painful motion. After the Inspector General flagged it, VA fixed the decision in August 2025 and the veteran got $29,130 in back pay.

Here's the part to read carefully. VA told the Inspector General it had corrected every error the review team found, which means the cases in its sample. The report doesn't describe VA going back through the rest of those tens of thousands of decisions. And when the team briefed VA leaders in January 2026, they said no action had been taken yet on the conflicting interpretations of the rule.

The rule VA kept missing

It's a short regulation, 38 CFR §4.59, and one sentence does the heavy lifting. VA intends to recognize "actually painful, unstable, or malaligned joints, due to healed injury, as entitled to at least the minimum compensable rating for the joint."

Minimum compensable just means the lowest rating that pays. Under the joint tables in §4.71a, that's 10% for a knee (limited bending) or an ankle, and 20% for a shoulder (arm motion limited at shoulder level). So a knee that bends the full distance but hurts doing it can still rate 10%.

The same regulation also says how the joint should be tested: for pain on active and passive motion, with and without weight on it, and against the opposite joint if that one's healthy. An exam that skipped those checks is thinner than the rule expects.

Your own words count

The report points to a 2015 Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims decision, Petitti v. McDonald, 27 Vet. App. 415. It held that a veteran's own description of painful motion can be enough for a paying rating, if VA finds it credible. VA's procedures manual says the same thing, according to the report.

The confusion the Inspector General found was mostly about that. Processors weren't sure whether a veteran's report of pain carried the same weight as an examiner's measurement. Some offices inside VA's Compensation Service didn't agree on whether pain without painful motion is enough. The report told VA to get a clear legal answer on that, so for now it's unsettled. Painful motion itself isn't.

How to check your own rating

1. Find your zeros. Pull up your rating codesheet or decision letter and look for any joint listed at 0% or "noncompensable." Our guide to reading your codesheet shows where to look.
2. Get the exam report. It's the Disability Benefits Questionnaire in your claims file. Here's how to request your C-file.
3. Search it for pain. Look for pain on motion, pain with weight bearing, pain after repetitive use, flare-ups, or functional loss due to pain. Check where on the range of motion the pain started.
4. Check your own statements. Anything you wrote or told VA about the joint hurting when you move it is evidence too.
5. Compare. If painful motion is in the record and the joint still sits at 0%, the decision may have missed §4.59. That's exactly the error the report describes.

If yours looks wrong

What makes sense depends mostly on the date of the decision.

Decided within the last year. A Higher-Level Review fits when the pain is already in the record. A more senior reviewer looks at the same evidence for errors, and no new evidence is allowed (§3.2601(f)), so you'd point to the exam findings and the rule. If the pain never got written down, a supplemental claim lets you add new evidence, like your own detailed statement. Either one filed within the year keeps your original effective date (§3.2500(h)). Our deadline calendar will count the year from your letter.

Older than a year. A claim for increase is the practical route. Back pay can reach up to a year before you file if the records show the joint got worse in that window (§3.400(o)(2)). Getting back pay for an older decision that misapplied the rule means proving clear and unmistakable error, which is a high bar. Talk that one through with someone accredited.

Worried an increase claim puts your other ratings at risk? The reduction protections are stronger than most people think.

Sources

• VA Office of Inspector General, Review of Assignment of Noncompensable Musculoskeletal Joint Disabilities, report 25-02645-131, August 6, 2026.
• 38 CFR §4.59, painful motion, and §4.71a, the joint rating tables (diagnostic codes 5201, 5260, 5271).
• 38 CFR §3.2601(f), Higher-Level Review record; §3.2500(h), continuous pursuit; §3.400(o)(2), increase effective dates.
• Petitti v. McDonald, 27 Vet. App. 415 (2015), as cited in the Inspector General's report.
• 2026 compensation rates: our pay chart, from VA.gov rates effective December 1, 2025.