A Board denial is not the end: denials appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims get set aside far more often than veterans expect — and the Court's decisions say exactly why. This page chains our Board-level outcome data with court-level reversal intelligence: which denial reasoning fails on appeal, and the arguments that beat it.
From the Court's Annual Report to Congress (38 U.S.C. § 7288), table 5, appeals decided 2024-10-01 to 2025-09-30. These are all appeals, not just published ones.
| Disposition (FY2025) | Appeals |
|---|---|
| Affirmed | 363 |
| Affirmed or dismissed in part, reversed or vacated and remanded in part | 3,656 |
| Reversed or vacated and remanded in whole or in part | 816 |
| Remanded | 2,883 |
| Dismissed for lack of jurisdiction or timeliness | 217 |
| Dismissed for default | 231 |
| Dismissed voluntarily | 592 |
| Total | 8,758 |
3,534 of the 3,656 partial dispositions and 2,877 of the 2,883 remands were entered by the Clerk, i.e. on the parties' joint motion rather than by a Judge. In 76% of conferenced cases VA agreed the Board's decision contained error requiring remand. On the Board's side, approximately 8% to 9% of its decisions are appealed to the Court each year and the Board received about 5,310 joint-motion remands in FY2024 (BVA Chairman's Annual Report). Source: FY2025 Annual Report, p. 3.
The Court publishes a few dozen opinions and orders a year — the ones it wants cited. They are where the reasoning lives, so the pattern analysis below is built on them. Their disposition mix is not the appeal-wide rate above.
A high disturb rate does not mean any individual appeal is likely to win: it means appealed denials often contain findable legal error, and the Court tends to publish the decisions that explain what that error was.
Grouped by the reasoning the decision text dwells on most (keyword-tagged, so a decision about several things is counted once, under its dominant theme). The lines under each type are verbatim sentences, from decisions that set the Board aside, in which the Court says what the Board got wrong.
| Denial reasoning | Cases | Set aside |
|---|---|---|
| Effective date | 147 | 40.8% (60/147) |
| Inadequate reasons or bases • By neglecting to explain its decision not to apply that regulation, the Board failed to provide "a written statement of [its] findings and conclusions, and the reasons or bases for those findings and conclusions, on [a] material [issue of law] presented on the record. (No. 03-1204, 2006) • Here, the Board failed to address whether an autopsy to determine the cause of death could be reasonably obtained or whether an autopsy would even be helpful in this case. (No. 05-0189, 2007) | 106 | 58.5% (62/106) |
| Other / unclassified | 104 | 37.5% (39/104) |
| Rating criteria application • The Board failed to explain how a 40% schedular rating adequately compensates the appellant's service-connected disability. (No. 16-1093, 2018) | 104 | 56.7% (59/104) |
| Clear and unmistakable error • As explained above, the Court holds that the Board erred in its determination that appellant's CUE allegation must be denied as a matter of law. (No. 17-3766, 2021) | 100 | 41.0% (41/100) |
| Duty to assist • The Court holds that a remand is necessary because the Secretary did not satisfy his heightened duty to assist this appellant and the Board failed to provide an adequate statement of reasons or bases for its findings and conclusions. (No. 05-2475, 2006) • Based on the record viewed in its entirety, the Court is left with a definite and firm conviction that the Board erred in its finding that the duty to assist had been fulfilled, and therefore we hold that this finding is clearly erroneous. (No. 04-0957, 2007) | 66 | 53.0% (35/66) |
| TDIU (unemployability) | 58 | 51.7% (30/58) |
| Presumptions of service connection | 46 | 65.2% (30/46) |
| New & material / relevant evidence | 42 | 52.4% (22/42) |
| Nexus (medical link to service) | 23 | 56.5% (13/23) |
| Credibility findings | 20 | 50.0% (10/20) |
| Lay evidence and competence • Nonetheless, the Board failed to consider the lay evidence of record regarding the appellant's observable PTSD symptoms. (No. 05-3204, 2008) | 15 | 60.0% (9/15) |
Published decisions whose text mentions the condition at least twice. A percentage is shown only where there are 20 or more.
| Condition | Published decisions | Board set aside |
|---|---|---|
| PTSD | 160 | 48.1% |
| Psychiatric | 146 | 47.3% |
| TDIU | 123 | 51.2% |
| Depression | 85 | 50.6% |
| Knee | 80 | 57.5% |
| Heart | 76 | 43.4% |
| Ankle | 75 | 50.7% |
| Back | 68 | 58.8% |
| Hearing Loss | 63 | 57.1% |
| Arthritis | 55 | 54.5% |
| Eye | 50 | 54.0% |
| Diabetes | 43 | 60.5% |
| Tinnitus | 42 | 57.1% |
| Anxiety | 41 | 41.5% |
| GI | 40 | 52.5% |
| Respiratory | 40 | 65.0% |
| Skin | 39 | 61.5% |
| Radiculopathy | 33 | 54.5% |
| Hypertension | 29 | 55.2% |
| Headache | 29 | 48.3% |
| Shoulder | 28 | 53.6% |
| Cervical | 26 | 65.4% |
| Hip | 23 | 65.2% |
| Sleep Apnea | 15 | 7 of 15 |
| Prostate | 13 | 5 of 13 |
| Erectile Dysfunction | 10 | 4 of 10 |
Read by rule, quoted verbatim. Each decision's outcome is taken from its own holding sentence; reasoning types and conditions are keyword tags; every quoted passage is the Court's own sentence from the cited decision, with the veteran's name removed. Nothing here is a machine summary. Read any cited decision in full at the Court's opinions page or by docket number on CourtListener.
Selection effects run both directions. Veterans appeal their strongest denials; VA concedes error in joint motions. Neither makes your case a coin flip — the value here is the pattern: which Board reasoning is fragile, and what argument broke it.
VetAid's free analyzer reads your decision against these same patterns: the denial reasoning used, the arguments that have beaten it, and your CAVC deadline (120 days, 38 U.S.C. § 7266).
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