There are two VA pay raises coming this year, not one.

There are two VA pay raises coming this year, not one. And the first one is not the COLA that everybody keeps talking about. It lands on October 1st, a full two months before the December raise most veterans are watching for. And depending on which benefit you are on, it can be the bigger of the two. Almost nobody sees it coming because everybody has their eyes pointed at the wrong month. These two raises do not go to the same people, and they do not land in the same month, and that trips a lot of veterans up. So I am going to walk both of them with you, the October one and the December one. Who actually gets each one, the real dollar figures the VA has already published, and how to know what your own number is today versus where it is headed. Because if you have got a check going up on October 1st, the last thing I want is for you to sit around until January before you even notice it. Let me tell you who I am before we go any further. My name is Frank Sutherland. I served, and these days I spend my time reading the parts of the VA system that decide what actually shows up in your bank account, the rate tables, the fiscal calendars, the fine print that nobody reads to you out loud. I am not an attorney and I am not a VA claims examiner. I just read the paperwork and tell you in plain words what it says. And today the paperwork says there is money moving twice this year, not once. Now, before we get into it, stay with me even if you are not the one going to school, because this matters to more of you than you think. The October raise touches two groups. It touches veterans who are in a training program through the VA, and it touches the spouses and the children of disabled veterans who are using their education benefits. So even if you are sitting there at 100% thinking none of this is you, you may have a wife or a son or a daughter in a classroom right now with a check that is about to go up. And the December raise, that one touches nearly all of us. So there is something in this for you, no matter where you sit. Let me start by explaining why there are two different dates at all, because once you understand that, the whole thing makes sense. Your VA disability compensation, the monthly check you get for your service-connected conditions, is tied by law to something called the cost of living adjustment. People call it the COLA. Every year the Social Security Administration looks at how much prices have gone up, they calculate a percentage, and by law the VA takes that same percentage and applies it to your compensation. So when you hear that Social Security recipients are getting a raise, you are getting that exact same raise on your VA check. That is the December 1st raise. It shows up on the payment at the end of December, which officially is your January 1st payment, and they pay it early because of the New Year holiday. But here is the thing most veterans never learned. Not every VA benefit runs on that Social Security clock. Some of them run on a completely different calendar. They run on the federal fiscal year, and the federal fiscal year does not start in January and it does not start in December. It starts on October 1st. So the benefits that are tied to the fiscal year get their raise on October 1st, two full months before the compensation crowd sees a single extra dollar. That is the raise nobody talks about. That is the one hiding in plain sight. And I want you to understand this is not some quirk or some mistake, it is built that way on purpose. The education benefits are tied to the school year and the government's budget year, and both of those turn over in the fall, not the winter. It makes sense when you think about it. A student is starting a new academic year in the fall, so their rate resets in the fall. Your compensation on the other hand was written into law to track Social Security, so it moves whenever Social Security moves, which is the new year. Two different purposes written into two different laws running on their own separate clocks. Nobody ever sat down and lined them up with each other. The result is that if you happen to be on both kinds of benefit at the same time, you actually get two raises in the same 12-month stretch on two different dates, and most people only ever notice one of them. And that difference in calendars is not just trivia, it actually changes the size of the raise. When a benefit is on the fiscal year clock, it is often responding to a different and sometimes fresher read on how much prices have gone up. The compensation COLA is locked to one specific Social Security calculation. The fiscal year benefits use their own inflation measure, and in years where costs have been climbing, that separate measure has sometimes come in hotter, which is exactly how the education side ends up with a bigger percentage bump than the compensation side. Same country, same inflation, two different rulers measuring it, and they do not always land on the same number. So let me take them one at a time, and let me start with the October one because that is the one you have never heard anybody explain. There are two benefits that get the October 1st raise. The first one is Chapter 35. That is the Dependents Educational Assistance program. In plain English, that is the benefit that pays for the education of the spouse and the children of a veteran who is permanently and totally disabled, or who died from a service-connected condition. If you are a disabled veteran and your kid is in college on this benefit, or your spouse went back to school on it, this is the check we are talking about. Right now, today, the full-time rate on Chapter 35 is $1,574 a month. That is what a spouse or a child going to school full-time is getting. If they are going three-quarter time, it is $1,243. Half-time is $910. Those are the numbers in effect right now. And here is the key part: those numbers are set to run through the end of September, and then on October 1st they change. They go up.