About VeteranBenefitsEstimator

VeteranBenefitsEstimator is a free set of calculators for service members and veterans. It covers two areas where the arithmetic is genuinely non-obvious and the stakes are real: scoring the Army Fitness Test, and working out how the VA combines disability ratings into the percentage it actually pays on.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you type — no scores, no ratings, no circumstances — is sent anywhere or stored.

Where the numbers come from

Calculators in this space go stale quietly, and a stale table gives a confidently wrong answer rather than an obviously broken one. The Army replaced the ACFT with the AFT in mid-2025 and reissued its scales; VA compensation rates change every December. So each page names the document it implements and the date that document took effect:

• Army Fitness Test scoring — AFT Final Tables (Update) 15 MAY 25, approved 15 May 2025, effective 1 June 2025. The scoring tables were parsed directly from that PDF rather than retyped, so the thresholds match the published document exactly.
• VA combined ratings — 38 CFR 4.25 — Combined ratings table (7-1-25 Edition). The implementation reproduces every worked example printed in the regulation itself, which is the test that it is faithful rather than approximately right.
• VA compensation rates — VA disability compensation rates, effective 1 December 2025.

What is deliberately missing

Some calculators people look for are not here yet, and that is on purpose. A Basic Allowance for Housing calculator needs the current DoD rate tables for every military housing area, and a military pay chart needs the current DFAS basic pay table — neither could be retrieved from an official source when this site was built, and inventing pay figures would be worse than omitting them. The same applies to the service-specific fitness tests for the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, and to Army body composition standards. They will appear when their official tables can be sourced properly.

This is not official guidance

VeteranBenefitsEstimator is an independent site with no affiliation to the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, or any branch of the armed forces. Everything here is an unofficial estimate for personal planning. Your official fitness score is the one recorded by your grader and your unit; your official disability rating and monthly compensation are determined by the VA.

Who runs this site

Elbert Ballo builds and maintains VeteranBenefitsEstimator. Each source above was fetched and read directly, not summarized secondhand, and the combined-ratings math was independently re-derived from the regulation's own text before being checked against the live calculator.