Data · VA spending
VA benefit dollars, county by county
How many dollars of disability compensation, pension and survivor benefits the Department of Veterans Affairs sends to each county every year, and how fast that has moved. We read VA's own Geographic Distribution of VA Expenditures workbook cell for cell, recompute its totals, add counties up to states and the nation, and tie each cut of the dollars to the others.
What is in this dataset?
Dollars the Department of Veterans Affairs paid in direct benefits in fiscal year 2025 in every U.S. county, from the Geographic Distribution of VA Expenditures (GDX) workbook of VA's National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics: disability compensation and veterans pension, dependency and indemnity compensation (DIC) and survivors pension, insurance, and specially adapted housing, with the total recomputed as the sum of the four (the workbook's Total column is a formula), and the compensation, pension and survivor dollars of the year before for the change. One record per county or county equivalent (3,223), per state, DC, Puerto Rico and Guam, for foreign countries, the Freely Associated States, other U.S. territories and unknown addresses, and for the US (187,660,338,257 dollars in all). Counties carry the Census FIPS code; Connecticut's counties are the planning regions.
Use it to size a veterans' disability practice by money, not headcount: how many dollars of compensation and survivor benefits reach a county every year, how fast that is growing, and how a county compares with its state. Pair it with the va-compensation dataset (recipients by rating) by county FIPS code. Agents can look up a state and its counties, compare up to ten states, or search a county by name.
- Records
- 3,281
- Look up by
- 54
- state
- Primary source
- 3,281
The letters are explained in what P, S, D and U mean.
Where does the data come from?
Read from VA's GDX workbook for the fiscal year (and the year before) cell for cell: the 'County Direct Exp', 'State Direct Exp' and 'CD Direct Exp' sheets. The workbook's Total column is a formula, so the total in each record is recomputed as the sum of the four direct categories and checked against the workbook's cached value. County rows are matched to vintage-2025 county FIPS codes in the shared crosswalks by state and county name (Connecticut's eight retired counties are listed with no dollars and are left out; its planning regions carry them). A gate re-reads fifty counties from the live workbook with a separate reader, checks that counties add up to VA's state rows and states to its Grand total, ties the Congressional District sheet (a separate cut of the same dollars) to each state, and holds dollars per recipient against the va-compensation dataset.
- Period covered
- October 1, 2024 to September 30, 2025
- Places
- The whole US, states and counties
- How often we refresh it
- Once a year
- The source's next release
- October 2026
- Records read
- October 29, 2026
Official sources
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics (GDX), by bulk download. A work of the U.S. government, public domain (17 U.S.C. 105); published by VA's National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics for public reuse. No separate licence is attached to the workbook..
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics (GDX report page), by official web pages. A work of the U.S. government, public domain (17 U.S.C. 105); published by VA's National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics for public reuse. No separate licence is attached to the workbook..
The sources the records cite most
- VA NCVAS, GDX report page: 3,281 records
- VA NCVAS, Geographic Distribution of VA Expenditures FY2024 (year-earlier figures): 3,281 records
- VA NCVAS, Geographic Distribution of VA Expenditures FY2025: 3,281 records
What does a record look like?
-
United States: VA paid $187,660,338,257 in direct benefits in fiscal year 2025, of which $175,909,194,687 was disability compensation and veterans pension and $11,059,610,708 was dependency and indemnity compensation and survivors pension. Compensation, pension and survivor dollars were up $33,118,304,896 from fiscal year 2024.
Status P · checked October 29, 2026 · source: VA NCVAS, Geographic Distribution of VA Expenditures FY2025
-
Texas: VA paid $21,856,946,830 in direct benefits in fiscal year 2025, of which $20,782,556,916 was disability compensation and veterans pension and $1,015,381,398 was dependency and indemnity compensation and survivors pension. Compensation, pension and survivor dollars were up $3,997,200,652 from fiscal year 2024.
Status P · checked October 29, 2026 · source: VA NCVAS, Geographic Distribution of VA Expenditures FY2025
-
Florida: VA paid $16,674,726,297 in direct benefits in fiscal year 2025, of which $15,670,888,782 was disability compensation and veterans pension and $943,875,203 was dependency and indemnity compensation and survivors pension. Compensation, pension and survivor dollars were up $3,148,027,394 from fiscal year 2024.
Status P · checked October 29, 2026 · source: VA NCVAS, Geographic Distribution of VA Expenditures FY2025
-
Virginia: VA paid $8,438,181,869 in direct benefits in fiscal year 2025, of which $8,074,996,389 was disability compensation and veterans pension and $339,373,736 was dependency and indemnity compensation and survivors pension. Compensation, pension and survivor dollars were up $1,625,600,434 from fiscal year 2024.
Status P · checked October 29, 2026 · source: VA NCVAS, Geographic Distribution of VA Expenditures FY2025
The full records add the dates, the quoted source text and every field in the CSV and JSON files below.
What each of the 20 main columns means
jurisdiction- Two-letter code of the state, DC or territory, or US
level- county, state (states, DC, Puerto Rico and Guam), foreign, fas, other-territories, unknown or us
county- 5-digit county FIPS code (vintage 2025; Connecticut's retired counties keep their old codes); empty for other levels
countyName- County name as the Census Bureau writes it
stateName- State name
value- Same as totalDirect: dollars of VA direct benefit expenditures
unit- What the value counts
fiscalYear- VA fiscal year of the dollars (it ends September 30)
totalDirect- Total direct expenditure in dollars: compPension + dicSurvivors + insurance + adaptedHousing, recomputed
compPension- Disability compensation and veterans pension payments, dollars
dicSurvivors- Dependency and indemnity compensation (DIC) and survivors pension, including benefits for children of certain veterans, dollars
insurance- VA life insurance payments (death claims, dividends, cash surrenders and disability benefits), dollars
adaptedHousing- Specially Adapted Housing and Special Housing Adaptation grants, dollars
compSurvivors- compPension + dicSurvivors: the dollars that follow disability, pension and survivor awards
compPension_prev- compPension a year earlier (previous fiscal year's workbook), dollars; empty where the county could not be matched
dicSurvivors_prev- dicSurvivors a year earlier, dollars
change_comp_survivors- compSurvivors less the year-earlier figures, dollars
change_pct- change_comp_survivors as a percent of the year-earlier compSurvivors
effectiveFrom- First day of the fiscal year
effectiveTo- Last day of the fiscal year
How do I use it in my own tools?
vaspending_lookup- For one two-letter state code (or US): the dollars VA paid in direct benefits in the state and every county in it, split into compensation and pension, survivor benefits, insurance and adapted housing, with the change from a year earlier.
vaspending_compare- The VA benefit-dollar records of up to 10 states (two-letter codes) or US side by side: total, compensation and pension, survivor dollars and the change over a year.
vaspending_search- VA benefit-dollar records whose text matches the words given, such as a county name ("Bexar County"), a state name or a 5-digit county FIPS code.
How to cite this dataset
You can reuse, adapt and republish this data, including commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0). The only condition is that you credit Probative and link to the source.
- Version
- 1.0.0, released October 29, 2026
- Every version
- 10.5281/zenodo.23753087 (always points to the newest)
- License
- CC BY 4.0
Download the data
- CSV: va-spending.csv 3072 KB · one row per record (columns in README.txt)
- JSON: va-spending.json 6283 KB · every record with its sources
Free, no email or login. The files are hosted on this site and Zenodo, a public research archive.
Suggested citation
Probative. (2026). VA disability compensation, pension and survivor dollars by county (VA GDX report) (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23753088
Credit line for a chart, table or article
Source: Probative, VA disability compensation, pension and survivor dollars by county (VA GDX report), version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23753088, licensed CC BY 4.0.
Add to a reference manager (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote)
Not legal advice. These are dollars VA paid, placed by the address of the veteran or survivor receiving them; they are not claims, awards, backlogs or unmet need. Questions about a claim are for an accredited attorney, agent or veterans service officer.
What changed recently?
- 2026-10-29 · VA direct benefit expenditures in fiscal year 2025 for every county, state and the US, split into disability compensation and pension, survivor benefits, insurance and adapted housing: 187,660,338,257 dollars in all, with the year-earlier compensation and survivor dollars for comparison. (source)
The full log is in changes.json.
What are the limits?
- These are dollars paid in the fiscal year, placed by the address of the veteran or survivor who receives them. They are not claims, awards, backlogs or the number of veterans, and they say nothing about who needs a lawyer.
- A veteran who moves during the year appears where VA last had an address. A county with a large military hospital or retirement community can show dollars that do not describe the people who work there.
- The workbook has no suppressed cells, but its figures carry whatever address errors are in VA's files; payments with no usable address sit in their own unknown row and count only in the national total.
- Insurance and adapted housing payments are small next to compensation and pension; the total includes them. The year-earlier comparison covers compensation and survivor dollars only, because VA regrouped several other categories between the two workbooks.
- Puerto Rico and Guam have state-level rows; other territories, the Freely Associated States and foreign countries are single rows with no county split.
- The workbook is published once a year, so the latest fiscal year can be many months old.
- Records older than 400 days since their last check are marked
stalein the files until we re-check them. Every confirmed error we fix is listed in the data corrections log.
Found a wrong value? Report an error with the record id and the source that shows the right value.
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