Source and reference date
The governing source is the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs dataset FY 2025 Disability Compensation Recipients by County. It describes Veterans receiving VA Disability Compensation benefits as of September 30, 2025.
VA identifies the underlying sources as USVETS25 data, Veterans Benefits Administration VETSNET FY 2025 compensation data, and September 2025 Melissa Data geography. The National Center for Veterans Analysis & Statistics prepared the source report.
Unit of analysis
Each row is a VA-published county or special geography record. The file contains 3,148 unique geography records. Of these, 3,144 are counties or county equivalents in the 50 states and District of Columbia and can be depicted on the national county map.
VA publishes Puerto Rico as one territory-wide record in this file. It also publishes aggregate rows for U.S. territories excluding Puerto Rico, other foreign countries, and unknown geography. Those records remain searchable and downloadable but are not treated as U.S. counties.
Published measures
The website preserves the source fields for total recipients, five total service-connected disability (SCD) rating bands, three age groups, male recipients, and female recipients.
- SCD rating: 0%–20%
- SCD rating: 30%–40%
- SCD rating: 50%–60%
- SCD rating: 70%–90%
- SCD rating: 100%
Calculated shares divide a published rating count by the published total for that same geography. The combined 70%–100% measure adds the published 70%–90% and 100% bands only when both are available.
What the numbers do—and do not—mean
The figures count compensation recipients, not dollars. They do not measure the number of claims, individual conditions, medical diagnoses, compensation payments, total compensation expenditures, or all Veterans living in a county.
A high recipient count can reflect the size of a county, its Veteran population, its military footprint, migration, age structure, claims participation, and other factors. A county total should not be interpreted as a disability prevalence rate without a governed Veteran-population denominator.
Suppression and missing values
VA explains that blank cells represent small counts suppressed to protect Veterans’ identities and, in some cases, complementary suppression that prevents a protected value from being derived. This publication preserves every blank as missing and displays “Not published.”
- No blank is converted to zero.
- No suppressed value is estimated or imputed.
- A calculated share is blank if its required numerator or denominator is blank.
- A rating-band row is certified as reconciled only when all five bands are published and their sum equals the published total.
The source has 13 geography rows without a published total. Across the 2,801 rows where all five rating bands are published, the bands reconcile exactly to the total in every row.
Age and sex limitations
VA notes that age and sex categories may not sum to a geography’s total because some records lack birthdate or sex information. At the national source level, VA reports 878 Veterans without available sex and 28 without available age. Blank county cells may also reflect suppression.
End-of-year scope
The dataset describes recipients on the rolls at the end of FY 2025. VA reports that 149,077 Veterans received disability compensation during FY 2025 but were no longer recipients at fiscal year end; those Veterans are not included in this table.
Ranking rules
Count rankings include geographies with a published value for the selected measure. Percentage rankings require a published numerator and total and apply a minimum-total screen of 100 recipients to reduce unstable comparisons driven by very small denominators. The displayed “view rank” is recomputed within the current state and search filters.
County profile pages also show national and within-state ranks by total recipients. Those ranks use descending published totals; ties share the same competition rank.
Map construction
The national map uses the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2025 cartographic boundary file for counties at 1:20,000,000 scale. This simplified boundary layer is designed for thematic mapping. Map colors use national county quantiles for the selected measure; gray indicates no published value.
Validation
The publication validates the 14 required columns, unique geography identifiers, integer parsing, nonnegative values, rating-band reconciliation where complete, profile generation, internal links, download files, and asset references. The attached source was also compared with the official VA portal export after normalizing thousands separators; the data content matched.
Responsible reuse
Use the normalized download for analysis while preserving the blank-value rules. Cite the Department of Veterans Affairs as the data source and National Data System as the publication layer. Do not use this county-level dataset to infer an individual Veteran’s rating or benefit status.