Assistance program
Pension for Non-Service-Connected Disability for Veterans
$20.5 Billion committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- Veterans Benefits Administration, Veterans Affairs, Department of
- Assistance
- Direct Payments With Unrestricted Use
- CFDA number
- 64.104
- What it does
- To assist wartime veterans in need whose non-service- connected disabilities are permanent and total preventing them from following a substantially gainful occupation.
- Who benefits
- Disabled veterans.
- Who applies
- A Veteran who meets the wartime service requirements is potential eligible if he/she is: • permanently and totally disabled for reasons not necessarily due to service, • age 65 or older, or • is presumed to be totally and permanently disabled for pension purposes because: o he/she is a patient in a nursing home for long-term care due to a disability, or o being disabled, as determined by the Commissioner of Social Security (SS) for purposes of any benefits administered by the Commissioner, such as SS disability benefits or Supplemental Security Income. Income restrictions are prescribed in 38 U.S.C. 1521. Pension is not payable to those whose estates are so large that it is reasonable they use the estate for maintenance. A Veteran meets wartime service requirements if he/she served: • a total of 90 days or more during one or more periods of war; • 90 or more consecutive days that began or ended during a period of war; or • for any length of time during a period of war if he/she was discharged or released for a service-connected disability. Veterans entering service after September 7, 1980, must also meet the minimum active duty requirement of 24 months of continuous service or the full period to which the Veteran was called to active duty. (38 U.S.C.5303(A)).
- Authorized by
- 38 U.S.C. 1511, 1513, 1521, 1525
- Program site
- https://www.va.gov/pension/ ↗
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Recipients
This program's money is paid out as non-itemized direct payments — USAspending records it under a single aggregate, so individual recipients aren't listed. The dollars and agencies above are complete; the recipient roster isn't part of the public record for programs like this.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments