Veterans live with a low-grade dread about the VA taking back what it granted, and we've written about
how to fight a proposed reduction when the letter arrives. What that post didn't cover is the quieter, better news: the longer you've held a rating, the harder the law makes it to touch. There's a whole architecture of protection built on time, and most veterans have never been told which protections they've already accumulated.
Here's the ladder, rung by rung.
Five years: the stabilization rule
A rating in place for five years or more is treated as stabilized, and the VA can't reduce it based on a single exam showing improvement. The agency has to show sustained improvement, demonstrated across the record and under the ordinary conditions of your life, not a good day in an exam room.
That last part carries weight in practice. Improvement that shows up in a controlled setting, or that hasn't held up over time, is not supposed to support a cut on a long-held rating. When reductions get overturned, this is frequently why.
Ten years: service connection locks
Once a condition has been service-connected for ten continuous years, the VA generally can't sever that service connection at all, absent fraud. Read the boundary carefully: the connection is protected, not the percentage. Your rating can still be reduced under the ordinary rules, but the VA can no longer decide your condition was never service-connected in the first place.
That distinction sounds technical until you consider what severance means. Reduction lowers your check. Severance ends the entitlement. Ten years takes the second one off the table.
Twenty years: the percentage locks too
At twenty continuous years, a rating becomes protected at or above the level it has held, absent fraud. This is the strongest protection in the system: the VA can't drop you below that percentage, period.
The practical consequence is one veterans rarely think through. If you're at nineteen years and change on a rating, the calendar itself is doing work for you, and any decision you make about filing for an increase should account for what's about to lock in. Which brings up the tension we've flagged before.
Permanent and total, and what it actually means
Separate from the year-based rules is P&T status, assigned when a total rating is both total and not expected to improve. P&T ratings are generally exempt from routine future examinations, which removes the reexamination cycle that starts most reductions. It also opens doors beyond your own check: dependent education benefits and health coverage for family members ride on P&T status in ways that make the designation worth confirming on your own decision letters.
P&T is not the same as the 100% rating itself, and veterans conflate them constantly. Check your paperwork for whether "permanent" appears, because the difference decides whether you should expect a reexamination notice in the mail.
How to use this
Three practical moves. First, count your years, per condition, from the effective date of each rating rather than from when your claim started; protections attach per rating, and veterans routinely have some protected and some not. Second, weigh the calendar before filing for an increase, because filing invites a look at the whole picture, and there's a real difference between doing that at year four and doing it at year twenty-one. Third, if a reduction letter arrives on a long-held rating, check the protections before you check anything else. A proposed cut to a twenty-year rating, or a severance attempt on a fifteen-year connection, is a decision that may be legally impossible, and
the review lanes exist for exactly that.
Where we come in
We're a veteran-led firm, and reduction defense is core work, starting with the question the VA's letter never asks: whether the law allows this cut at all. If you've held a rating for years and the VA is circling it,
reach out and we'll count the clock before they do.
