The Department of Veterans Affairs announced on October 29 that it plans to hire more than 2,000 employees in fiscal year 2027 to process disability compensation and pension claims. The announcement follows a fiscal 2026 in which VA processed a record 3.1 million claims. VA Secretary Doug Collins said the new hires “will help continue this landmark progress.”
The hiring is a plan, not a completed step. The announcement gives no start date for the new positions, no schedule for filling them and no target for how fast claims should be decided. VA’s fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30, so fiscal 2027 began this month and ends next September.
What the record year was
According to VA’s announcement, the department processed 3.1 million compensation and pension claims in fiscal 2026, a record. It also received more than 3.15 million claims submissions that year, another record and an 80 percent increase from fiscal 2022.
VA said it granted 60.1 percent of all claims filed in fiscal 2026 and reached an accuracy rate of 93.88 percent, the highest in three years. About 3.2 percent of claims decisions were appealed to the Board of Veterans’ Appeals. More than 13,000 employees are currently on board to process claims.
Collins said, “VA is putting Veterans first by making major improvements in claims processing volume, speed and accuracy.” The release ties the hiring to rising volume: claims are climbing partly because VA is working to enroll more veterans, with more than 11,000 live outreach events in fiscal 2026 and more than 300,000 new veterans enrolled in VA health care so far in calendar 2026.
For a veteran whose claim has been sitting for months, the announcement does not promise anything faster. It describes new hiring as a way to keep up with a growing workload and support gains in speed and accuracy. The practical step for anyone with a pending claim is to check its status directly on VA’s claim and appeal status page rather than wait for the new staff to arrive.
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Who the new hires are and where they will work
The positions are claims processor jobs, in which selected candidates interpret and apply laws, regulations and policies to disability claims. The release points to VA’s 56 Regional Benefits Offices as the workplaces tied to its WARTAC transition-training program. It does not list which offices will add staff or in which cities.
A claims processor is the person who reads a veteran’s file, weighs the evidence and applies the rating rules. More processors mean more files can be worked at once, but new hires take time to train before they carry a full caseload. The release says nothing about how long that training takes.
The fiscal-year framing matters for anyone counting dates. The more than 2,000 hires are planned for fiscal 2027, which runs through September 30, 2027, so they are not a calendar-year 2026 figure. Nothing in the announcement says how many of them have already been hired.
How fast claims are moving now
In a September 22 release, VA said it had passed 3 million fiscal 2026 decisions as of September 18, beating the prior record of 3.001 million set in fiscal 2025. That release put the average decision time at 75.6 days in September 2026, down from 141.5 days on January 20, 2025.
VA’s page on how to file a disability claim reports a slightly different September 2026 average of 68.2 days to complete disability-related claims. The two pages carry different figures for the same month, so a veteran’s own claim could run shorter or longer than either average. Neither number is a promise for an individual claim.
The September release also said VA’s claims backlog has fallen by more than 70 percent since January 20, 2025, and that the department grants more than 60 percent of submitted claims. The October 29 announcement adds the hiring plan on top of those results, pairing a record workload with a larger staff.
What a veteran with a pending claim can do
VA says there are five ways to file a disability claim: online, by mail, in person at a regional office, by fax, or with an accredited attorney, claims agent or veterans service organization representative. Evidence can be submitted up to 365 days after VA receives the claim.
The same page says a veteran does not need to do anything while waiting unless VA sends a letter asking for information, and should attend any scheduled exams. Those are the two moments when the claim depends on the veteran rather than on VA’s staffing.
The announcement lists a claims processor job posting on USAJOBS for veterans and others interested in the work, along with VA’s career pages and the Ask VA service for questions about a specific claim.
Another VA figure frames the scale of the hiring. With more than 13,000 employees already on board to process claims, 2,000 additional hires would add roughly 15 percent to that group if every position were filled, a calculation VA does not make in its release. How many of the planned hires replace departing staff is not stated.
Is your claim still sitting?
A hiring plan does nothing for a claim that is stalled today, and the announcement sets no date by which faster decisions should show up. A veteran who waits on the plan alone can lose months that a status check and a complete file could have saved.
The Veterans Benefits Action Kit includes claim status check steps and a plan for what to do about a stalled claim, along with a claim tracker that keeps dates, calls and letters in one place.
Its sections cover disability compensation and the three appeal lanes, so a veteran who gets a denial already knows the next move.
Get the claim status check steps and stalled-claim plan in The Veterans Benefits Action Kit →
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
