Object 97: 1925 Schedule of Disability Ratings   

During World War I, the U.S. government made two fundamental changes to the benefits system for Veterans. In 1917, Congress authorized a major expansion of the system, amending the War Risk Insurance Act of 1914 to introduce three new types of benefits: life and disability insurance, medical care, and vocational training.

The same amendment also revamped the way the government evaluated disability claims resulting from military service. The revised law required the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, the agency responsible for managing claims, to create a “schedule of ratings” representing the “reductions in earning capacity from specific injuries or combinations of injuries.” Ranging from 10 to 100, the ratings corresponded to the percentage of the dollar amount for total disability that the Veteran would receive as payment for a particular medical condition. The ratings schedule aimed to bring consistency and rigor to the process of determining the monetary value of a disability.

The methods used to award pensions to disabled Veterans in the nineteenth century were short on both of those qualities. After the Civil War, a hodgepodge of laws and regulations established fixed payment rates for some permanent injuries, such as loss of a toe or blindness in one eye. But for most conditions, medical examiners relied on a set of vague directives to assess the severity of the disability and whether the Veterans deserved a full or partial pension.

The absence of precise standards led to considerable variability in the adjudication of claims, to the chagrin of Veterans and government officials alike. “Equal justice can not be done for the soldier under the present system,” the Pension Commissioner complained to Congress in 1901. “[S]ome get too much, others too little, according to the measure of their disabilities.”

With passage of the amended War Risk Insurance Act in 1917, Congress sought to make a clean break from past practices. Legislators even employed new language to describe payments for disabilities. The law called such awards “compensation” rather than “pensions” to emphasize both its distance from the old system and its alignment with the workmen compensation laws recently adopted by many states and the federal government.

The Bureau of War Risk Insurance was slow in compiling the first ratings schedule. In September 1919, the bureau’s Medical Division completed a 48-page provisional schedule, but it was never formally approved and served as a guide only. Two years later, the Medical Division produced the first official edition of the ratings schedule. Roughly twice the length of the 1919 schedule, the 1921 schedule was a much more complete product. It contained detailed instructions, definitions, and explanations of the policies and procedures for evaluating claims. Disabilities were organized into seven medical categories. The ratings in each category were created by consulting experts in that field of medicine as well as the rating schedules used by U.S. allies in the war.

The 1921 ratings schedule went into effect in September of the same year. By this time, the Veterans Bureau had replaced the Bureau of War Risk Insurance as the executive agency in charge of all benefit programs for Great War Veterans. Once issued, the schedule was treated as a living document in keeping with the 1917 law, which called for ratings to be adjusted based on experience or new legislation.  Over the next three years, the Veterans Bureau made numerous modifications, large and small, to the schedule while issuing more than 100,000 compensation awards to Veterans

In 1924, however, Congress ordered the Veterans Bureau to conduct a wholesale revision of the schedule under the World War Veterans Act. The 1919 and 1921 schedules calculated disability ratings on the basis of the Veteran’s average income loss across all occupations. Now Congress wanted the Veterans Bureau to devise a schedule that took into account the Veteran’s line of work at the time of enlistment.

Constructing the new schedule was an arduous undertaking in large part because the agency had next to no models to guide its efforts. Research uncovered only one existing schedule that incorporated occupations in its disability ratings: the schedule created by the California Industrial Accident Commission. The Veterans Bureau hired the two actuarial experts who compiled the schedule as consultants. Staff members also gathered reports, studies, and data from every available source, including state compensation boards, the Departments of Labor and Commerce, and the International Labour Organization in Switzerland.     

The Veterans Bureau completed the schedule at the end of 1925, after more than a year of concentrated work. In its annual report to Congress, the bureau described the preparation of the schedule as “one of the heaviest constructive tasks that has ever confronted it.” The 1925 ratings schedule was the first to be professionally printed and published in a bound volume.

This edition continued to organize disabilities into seven broad categories. The schedule evaluated roughly 1,600 different medical conditions, but every injury was now assigned nine different ratings, arranged by column in ascending order. The column used depended on the occupational ratings table, which listed about 1,000 occupations. Cross-referencing the Veteran’s pre-war occupation with the body part affected by the injury yielded the column number, also referred to as the “occupational variant.”

Higher numbers translated into greater ratings, indicating a more severe impact on the Veteran’s earning capacity in a specific profession. For example, a train engineer with an occupational variant of 9 for hand injuries would receive a 56 percent rating for wrist ankylosis. In contrast, a floorwalker in a store with a variant of 1 would receive an 18 percent rating for the same medical condition.

Once the 1925 ratings schedule was in print, the Veteran’s Bureau hard work was far from over. Besides applying the schedule to new compensation claims submitted by Veterans, the agency had to re-evaluate over 200,000 active awards to account for potential rating changes. This entailed corresponding with all beneficiaries to collect information on their occupations prior to joining the military. Complications arose because some professions did not appear in the occupational ratings table. Additionally, some Veterans were not employed before entering the service or they had worked multiple jobs. Despite these difficulties, the bureau’s medical officers succeeded in rerating approximately 75 percent of existing cases in the first six months of 1926, leading to increased compensation payments for close to half.

The ratings schedule went through another two major revisions in the decades after 1925. The 1933 schedule, adopted during the Great Depression as an economizing measure, scrapped the occupational variants and reverted to the old method of determining ratings based on average loss of income. It also paid out lower benefits, but Congress intervened the following year and restored all compensation payments to their former levels. Finally, at the end of World War II, the Veterans Administration released the 1945 edition of the ratings schedule. While much modified and frequently updated, the 1945 schedule remains the basis of VA’s current system for evaluating and compensating Veterans for service-related disabilities.