Evaluative Rating: Impact of Medication

What it does

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) amends 38 CFR 4.10 within the VA Schedule for Rating Disabilities (VASRD). This amendment clarifies VA's longstanding interpretation of Sec. 4.10 and, in doing so, amends the text to correct judicial interpretations that VA has concluded misconstrue the role of medication and treatment in evaluating functional impairment. Specifically, this amendment clarifies that veterans should be compensated for the actual level of functional impairment they experience and, therefore, that the ameliorative effects of medication should not be estimated or discounted when evaluating the severity of a veteran's disability at the time of the disability examination. This regulation is needed immediately to minimize the negative impact of an erroneous line of cases culminating in the recent decision of Ingram v. Collins, 38 Vet. App. 130 (2025), which could be applied broadly to over 500 separate diagnostic codes, requiring re-adjudications of over 350,000 currently pending claims. This in turn would overburden VA's claims adjudicatory capacity. In addition, Ingram requires VA to retrain all of its medical examiners and adjudicators to make assessments and decisions based not on the evidence before them but instead based on what they hypothesize the evidence would show if a veteran's disability were left untreated. For these and other reasons explained below, this regulation is critical to the integrity of the VA disability claims system.

The Veterans Affairs Department's summary, as published in the Federal Register.

What changed in the regulation

1 part of Title 38 of the Code of Federal Regulations:

38 CFR 4

Wording on eCFR: the day before it took effect and from the day it took effect (first part listed).

Compared with

The Veterans Affairs Department has published 9 final rules in 2026 so far, compared with 15 in all of 2025.

Counted by the Tribune from Federal Register records since Jan. 1, 2025.

Before this

No earlier Federal Register document under regulation identifier 2900-AS49 since Jan. 1, 2025.

Since then:

• Feb. 27, 2026 Final rule; rescission of interim final rule. Rescission of Interim Final Rule, Evaluative Rating: Impact of Medication

What happens next and when

This interim final rule is effective February 17, 2026.

The agency's dates, word for word.

Check it yourself

• The document in the Federal Register
• Docket VA-2026-VBA-0067 on Regulations.gov
• Title 38 on eCFR

The record as published

Source: the Federal Register (public domain). The document in the Federal Register