Maximize Your Benefits. Optimize Your Life.

October 9, 2026

Quick favor if you use Gmail. If this landed in Promotions, drag it to Primary and hit reply with one word. Gmail pays attention to both, and it's the easiest way to make sure the next one finds you.

Last week was the start of the federal fiscal year, which is when a pile of VA numbers quietly change. So instead of building a new tool this week, I did the thing I keep telling you to do with your own benefits: I went back and checked everything.

All 25 tools. Every rate, every threshold, every state rule, every link. Each one checked against the government page it came from, not against what I had last time. Three days, about 4,200 source links tested. Everything below is live right now.

Some of what I found was the VA doing what it does every October. Some of it was states changing rules without telling anyone. And plenty were mine, which is the whole reason this runs on a schedule instead of waiting for a reader to catch it. I'll take them in that order (but please do always tell me when you see something that doesn’t make sense. I’ve updated many things in the tools from real feedback).

This is the part I'd bet most of you don't know, because I didn't.

Arizona. Since February 12, a veteran rated 100%, or on TDIU, owes zero property tax on their primary residence. No income test. My tools, and most sites I checked, still said the exemption was about $4,873 of assessed value if your household income was under $39,865. On a typical Arizona home that's the difference between a few hundred dollars a year and the whole bill.

California. The opposite problem: my state ranking tool had no property-tax row for California at all, so a 100% P&T veteran scored zero there. California exempts $180,671 of assessed value this year, or $271,009 if household income is under $81,131, and a new law restructures it again in January. It's in now.

New York. I had the new full exemption for 100% P&T veterans modeled as mandatory statewide. It isn't. Each county, town, village, and school district has to adopt it, and the first rolls it can apply to are the ones dated October 1, 2026 or later. If you're in New York, ask your assessor whether your locality adopted it before you plan around it.

Georgia. Both retirement tools said military retirement pay was exempt up to $65,000 at any age starting this year. I pulled the signed act. That section takes effect January 1, 2027. For 2026 Georgia is still on the old tiers: $17,500 under 62, $35,000 at 62 to 64, $65,000 at 65 and up. A widely shared veterans' summary had it wrong, and I had copied it.

South Carolina cut its income tax to two brackets this spring, 1.99% and 5.21%, and my salary tool was still on the old three-bracket table. Iowa shrank its disabled-veteran homestead tax break to half an acre for new applications. Oregon never passed the military retirement subtraction one of my tools gave it, and Kentucky only excludes $31,110 of pension, not all of it.

This is why the audit is on a schedule. Of everything I caught in my own tools, these three mattered most, and no reader had flagged any of them.

The Camp Lejeune settlement window closed on August 10, 2024. My Benefits Quiz was still telling veterans with Camp Lejeune exposure to file a Justice Act claim and counting it as $100,000 to $550,000 of value. If you filed before that deadline your claim is still being worked, and you track it through the Navy's Camp Lejeune Claims Unit. If you didn't, what's still open is the VA side: 30 days at Lejeune between 1953 and 1987 gets you presumptive service connection for eight conditions and VA health care for fifteen, filed as a normal VA claim. The Quiz now says exactly that.

The knee instability criteria were five years old. The VA rewrote how it rates a knee that gives out back in February 2021. It stopped grading "slight, moderate, severe" and started asking two concrete questions: what does the ligament imaging show, and has a provider prescribed a brace or a cane. My rating calculator, and the C&P prep tool that coaches off it, still taught the old scale. If you have a knee claim in, the thing that moves your rating is the prescription in your file, not how you describe the wobble.

Two pay tables were pre-audit copies. Back in July I verified the military retirement calculator's pay table cell by cell against DFAS. Two other tools had an older copy that was never swapped out. Every O-6 column from 18 years on was shifted one step low, about $635 a month at the over-18 mark, and prior-enlisted officer rows started two steps early. Both now pull from the verified table.

Still in, thinking about getting out. The Stay or Separate and Salary tools now run on the verified 2026 pay table and the right state tax brackets. If you're an O-5 or above, or prior enlisted, re-run your number. It moved.

Working a disability claim. Re-check your state's property-tax row in the Best State and P&T tools if you're in Arizona, California, New York, or Iowa. All four moved this week. And if your claim includes a knee, read the new criteria in the rating calculator before your exam.

Using education benefits. The MBA tool was a year stale, and the Yellow Ribbon rows were the worst of it. Chicago Booth is unlimited, not capped at $30,000. Rice is unlimited, not $17,250. Columbia is $30,000, not $20,000. USC Marshall doubled to $20,000. All 27 schools are on 2026-27 tuition now, and the housing allowance on every one of them is this year's rate. If you're applying this cycle, your out-of-pocket number changed.

Thinking about school abroad. The VA's list of eligible foreign schools shrank hard this year. Of the 232 foreign schools I track in the Freedom Index, 69 are no longer in the VA's Comparison Tool. Germany went from 70 eligible schools to 20. Those 69 are now flagged in the tool so it stops counting GI Bill money you couldn't collect. Check your school before you build a plan around it.

Buying a house. Two things. The FHA comparison was charging the 30-year insurance rate on 15-year scenarios, overstating FHA's cost by about 0.35 points a year; fixed. And the default interest rates in the calculators were set in August. The 30-year average has climbed more than half a point since then, to 7.28% on October 1 and 7.40% this week, so I moved the defaults up. Always put in your actual quote.

Picking a civilian career. The Department of Labor published new ten-year projections in August, and they are flatter than the numbers my tool was running on. Software developers went from 25% projected growth to 10%. Data engineers from 23% to 5%. Wind-turbine techs from 60% to 30%. Plumbers and HVAC techs went the other way, up to 7% and 11%. The Career Pathway tool now runs on the new numbers, with this year's wages for 128 careers, plus the June College Scorecard data for all 50 schools it tracks.

Two things are frozen on purpose. The cost-of-living layer in the Freedom Index is on a June snapshot, because the data provider's terms don't allow automated refreshes and I'm not paying a monthly fee for numbers that barely move inside a year. And about fifteen figures sit on government sites that block automated checks (DFAS, TSP, Social Security, Texas Veterans Commission). Nothing contradicted them, but I haven't put eyes on them myself yet. The audit record lists every one.

The next big turnover is December 1, when the VA compensation COLA lands. Social Security announces the number on October 14. Every rate that depends on it is in one list with the file it lives in, so the December update is a morning, not a week.

It's free, like everything else here, and it always will be.

This spot used to hold an ad. Now it's where I tell you about something I actually do.

If reading the state section made you realize your own situation has three or four moving parts you've never had someone sit down and work through with you, that's the work I do one-on-one. Grab a time and I'll tell you whether I can help.

A handful of states changed a veteran benefit in 2026 that I only caught this week, and I only went looking because October 1 made me. I want to know what I'm still missing.

Hit reply with your state. If something changed on you this year, a tax, an exemption, a plate, a tuition waiver, add a second line. I read every one, and the states that come up most get checked first.

Talk soon,
Zak