Veterans Appealing Disability Claims Wait an Average of 866 Days for Direct Review and Up to 6 Years Under the Legacy System

Veterans who appeal denied disability compensation claims to the Board of Veterans' Appeals (BVA) face extraordinary wait times that can stretch to years. In Q3 FY 2024, the average time to resolve a Direct Review appeal was 866 days (2.4 years), Evidence Submission appeals took 1,056 days (2.9 years), and Hearing Request appeals took 1,089 days (3.0 years). The average non-advanced AMA case is 3.6 years old. Under the pre-2019 Legacy appeals system, resolution takes approximately 6 years, and as of July 2025, nearly 36,000 Legacy cases remain unresolved. The average days to completion (ADC) peaked at 1,049 days in July 2024 before declining to 722 days by December 2024. Why it matters: A veteran denied benefits waits nearly 3 years on average just to have an appeal heard, so during that period they receive no disability compensation for conditions that may prevent employment, so veterans accumulate debt, lose housing, and experience financial crisis while their legitimate claims languish, so the financial stress compounds PTSD, chronic pain, and other service-connected conditions, so some veterans abandon meritorious appeals or experience catastrophic life outcomes including homelessness before their case is ever reviewed. The structural root cause is that the BVA's adjudication capacity has historically been scaled to a fraction of incoming appeals volume, and the 2019 Appeals Modernization Act (AMA) created three parallel docket tracks without sufficient staffing to process all three simultaneously, meaning efficiency gains on one docket come at the expense of delays on others.