VA claims file reader
A C-file arrives as one enormous PDF with no index and no order. Drop it here and get a map: what each document is, which pages it covers, and what your rating decisions actually say. Runs entirely in your browser.
Your file never leaves this computer.
Nothing is uploaded, stored, or sent anywhere — open your browser’s network tab and check. Your C-file holds your service records, medical history, and mental-health notes, and it is nobody else’s business. You can also disconnect from the internet before loading it.
About this C-file reader
Your claims file is the complete record the VA holds on you, and when you request it you get one enormous PDF — often well over a thousand pages, largely scanned, in no particular order, with no index. Finding your own rating decision in it can take an afternoon.
This reads every page, works out what each document is, and gives you a page index. Where it finds rating decisions, it pulls out the conditions, the percentages, and the effective dates, and works out your combined rating using the method the VA actually uses — which is not addition, and is the single most common source of confusion about your own rating.
Your file never leaves your computer. Everything runs inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and you can verify that in your browser’s network tab or simply disconnect from the internet before loading the file. Given what a C-file contains, that seemed like the only honest way to build this.
What this is not: it does not give advice, evaluate whether a decision was correct, estimate what you might receive, or tell you what to file. It reports what your own documents say and does published arithmetic on it. For advice, an accredited VSO representative or an accredited attorney can help you, and the VA publishes a directory of them. Accredited VSO help is free.
Common questions
- Is my C-file uploaded anywhere?
- No. Reading, OCR, and analysis all happen inside your browser on your own machine. Nothing is sent to a server, and no copy is kept. You can disconnect from the internet before loading the file and it still works.
- How do I get my C-file in the first place?
- You can request it from the VA under the Privacy Act, or download much of it through the VA.gov claim status tool. Requests by mail can take months; the online route is usually faster.
- Why is my combined rating lower than my ratings added up?
- Because the VA does not add them. Each rating applies to the portion of you that remains after the previous one, so 50% and 30% combine to 65%, which rounds to 70% — not 80%. The tool shows both the exact and the rounded figure.
- What is the bilateral factor?
- When you have disabilities affecting paired limbs — both knees, both arms — the VA adds an extra 10% of their combined value before combining with everything else. This tool flags when it might apply but does not calculate it, so your real rating may be higher than the number shown.
- Why did some pages come out as unidentified?
- Usually poor scans. Where a page has no text layer the tool runs OCR on it, but faint, skewed, or handwritten pages can still come back unreadable. Those are reported honestly rather than guessed at.
- Can it tell me if my rating is wrong or what to appeal?
- No, and it deliberately will not. That is advice, and giving it for a fee requires VA accreditation. This tool organizes and reports your own documents so you can have a better-informed conversation with an accredited representative — which is free through a VSO.