The five-minute version
File an Intent to File before you do anything else. It sets your effective date now and gives you a year to finish the claim. It is the cheapest money you will ever make.
Two veterans can have identical conditions, identical evidence, and identical ratings, and one gets thousands of dollars more than the other. The difference is usually the effective date.
Your rating decides how much you get each month. Your effective date decides how many months back that payment reaches.
How the date gets set
As a general rule, your effective date is tied to when VA received your claim — not when they finished deciding it. A claim that takes fourteen months to decide still pays back to the start, which is why a long wait is not the same as lost money.
What it does mean is that every month you spend thinking about filing is a month that is simply gone. Nothing recovers it later.
The Intent to File
This is the part most veterans do not know about, and it is the single highest-value thing on this page.
An Intent to File tells VA you are going to file. It takes a few minutes. Once it is in, you generally have a year to submit the complete claim, and if you do, your effective date reaches back to the Intent to File — not to the day you finally finished gathering records.
So the usual reasons for waiting — you do not have your records yet, you have not seen a doctor, you want to talk to a VSO first — stop costing you anything. Start the clock, then go do all of that.
An Intent to File expires
It holds your date for one year. If the complete claim does not arrive in that window, the protection lapses and you are back to the date of whatever you file later.
Where veterans lose money
- Waiting to feel “ready.” Gathering evidence is not filing. File the Intent to File first, then gather.
- Letting an Intent to File run out. Put the expiration on a calendar the day you submit it.
- Assuming a denial ends it. Appeal and review lanes have their own rules about preserving your original date — a denial is not automatically a reset.
- Not filing for a worsening condition. An increase generally runs from when you ask, so asking late costs the same way filing late does.
What to do today
If you have a service-connected condition you have not filed for, or one that has clearly gotten worse, file the Intent to File before you close this page. Everything else on your list can happen this month, next month, or whenever you get to it. That one step is the only part with a clock on it.