Roughly 2,044 Ogden veterans live without a service-connected disability rating, and if you are among them because the VA denied a claim it had every reason to grant, the attorneys at Hill & Ponton will help you challenge that decision.
Or perhaps you belong to the 1,849 Ogden veterans the Census counts as rated, but the percentage on your award letter has never squared with what you live through every day.
Whichever describes you, we are on your side. Hill & Ponton is a firm of VA-accredited disability attorneys, and we spend our days on one thing alone: appeals for veterans the VA has wrongly denied or shortchanged.
Whether your condition began in service or has worsened across the years that followed, we can take the case up from wherever it stopped, and you pay us nothing unless we win.
What Our VA Disability Lawyers Do for Ogden Veterans
- Disability Compensation: Our aim is the full monthly benefit your service-connected condition merits, plus any back pay that accrued during the months or years the VA left your claim unresolved.
- VA Disability Appeals: After a denial or a lowball rating, we carry the appeal the rest of the way, studying the complete file, surfacing records the VA never gathered, ordering the medical opinions it skipped, and presenting the claim as it should have stood from the beginning.
- Rating Increases: Few disabilities stay fixed, and most worsen as time passes. When yours has deteriorated since the VA last rated it, we prove the change and pursue the higher percentage, and the larger monthly benefit, it now warrants.
- Special Monthly Compensation: Veterans coping with the most severe injuries, an amputation, lost vision, or a housebound situation that requires daily attendance, can be owed compensation above the ordinary schedule through Special Monthly Compensation.
- Individual Unemployability: When service-connected conditions keep you from holding down a job, a rating below 100% can still be paid at the 100% rate. We gather the medical and employment evidence a TDIU award depends on.
- DIC and Survivor Benefits: Losing a veteran to a service-connected condition can entitle the spouse, a child, or a dependent parent left behind to Dependency and Indemnity Compensation and further support. We guide families through that process with the compassion it deserves.
How Your Disability Rating Sets Your Monthly Pay
The VA rates each service-connected condition somewhere between 10% and 100%, moving in ten-point steps, and that rating fixes how much your tax-free monthly benefit comes to. A higher percentage means a heftier payment.
If more than one condition is service-connected, the VA does not just total the percentages. It applies a combined-rating formula, and that is why a precise, well-evidenced claim makes such a difference.
To see what your combination of ratings should come to, try the VA disability calculator.
Below are this year’s monthly rates for a veteran filing alone, with no dependents:
- 10%: $180.42
- 20%: $356.66
- 30%: $552.47
- 40%: $795.84
- 50%: $1,132.90
- 60%: $1,435.02
- 70%: $1,808.45
- 80%: $2,102.15
- 90%: $2,362.30
- 100%: $3,938.58
Add dependents, a spouse, children, or reliant parents, and the totals climb; the VA also re-sets the table annually to keep up with inflation.
Federal compensation is only part of it. Utah veterans can also receive Utah state benefits, including a property tax break that increases with the rating percentage.
Let our team pursue your benefits
Pursuing a Toxic Exposure Claim Near Ogden
Ogden’s long run as a military and logistics hub left more than jobs behind; a few of its installations carry documented contamination. Veterans who served at one of them and later developed a serious illness may be entitled to compensation.
- Defense Depot Ogden (northwest Ogden, now redeveloped as Business Depot Ogden): For decades this Army supply depot buried and burned waste on site, leaving its soil and groundwater tainted with solvents, the pesticide DDT, PCBs, and heavy metals. It has been an EPA Superfund site since 1987, and veterans who worked there before later falling ill should have that exposure reviewed.
- Hill Air Force Base (about five miles south, straddling Davis and Weber counties): Years of aircraft maintenance and fire-training drills contaminated the groundwater here with the solvent TCE and with PFAS, the “forever chemicals” in firefighting foam. Any veteran stationed at Hill who went on to develop a linked illness has solid reason to look again at a denial.
- Tooele Army Depot (roughly 50 miles southwest): Decades of munitions storage and equipment work placed this base on the Superfund National Priorities List, with explosives residue, lead, and solvents documented at the site.
Should your service have taken you through any of these sites, or another base later linked to contamination, and a related diagnosis now weighs on you, an earlier denial need not settle the matter. Time and again our attorneys have traced veterans’ illnesses to the exposures responsible and secured the benefits they were due.
The Evidence That Turns a Denial Around
Every VA claim is judged against one three-part standard, and when any part is shaky, denial is the usual result.
- A current diagnosis – a licensed clinician, VA or civilian, has to confirm on the record that you currently carry the condition behind your claim.
- An in-service cause – the record needs to show that something in your service, an injury, an accident, an illness, or a toxic exposure, could realistically have brought the condition on or pushed it to worsen.
- A medical nexus – a qualified doctor has to bridge the two, attesting that your condition is, in the VA’s words, “at least as likely as not” a result of your service. This is the link that sinks the most claims, and where persuasive medical evidence carries the day.
Our VA disability attorneys know how the VA weighs each piece of proof, where claims tend to fall apart, and how to assemble yours so the final rating mirrors the life you actually lead.
Share the details of your case
When Should You Call a VA Disability Lawyer?
A lot of veterans handle the first filing themselves, and that is a fine way to begin. But once the VA turns you down, or returns a rating that bears no resemblance to the reality of your condition, experienced counsel can be what flips the outcome.
We built this practice to help veterans get through a system that often seems made to exhaust them. When a claim jams up behind missing evidence or a baffling decision, we open it, pinpoint what went wrong, and rebuild it. That experience has put us alongside countless veterans from coast to coast, and we would count it a privilege to do the same for Ogden.
VA disability law is always moving, through quiet rule changes and new decisions from the appeals courts, and we channel what we learn into the fight for higher ratings, unemployability awards, and the extra benefits you might be owed. The moment your rating misses the mark, or the VA locks you out, we are ready to step in.
A look at your situation costs you nothing, and our fee comes due only if your claim prevails. If the VA has shut the door on you, we can help you pry it open again.
VA Resources in and Around Ogden
- Ogden VA Clinic – A community-based outpatient clinic in the VA Salt Lake City Health Care System offering primary care, mental health, and a range of specialty services; its hospital-level care runs through the George E. Wahlen VA Medical Center in Salt Lake City, about 40 miles south. 3945 South Washington Boulevard, Suite 1, South Ogden, UT 84403. Phone: 801-479-4105
- Major Brent Taylor Vet Center Outstation – A community counseling site offering private, cost-free help with readjustment, post-traumatic stress, and military sexual trauma, kept separate from any clinical setting. 5957 Fashion Point Drive, Suite 101, South Ogden, UT 84403. Phone: 801-737-9737
- George E. Wahlen Ogden Veterans Home – A Utah state veterans home providing skilled nursing and long-term care, with the cost covered by the VA for veterans rated at 70% or higher. 1102 North 1200 West, Ogden, UT 84404. Phone: 801-334-4300
- Weber County Veterans Service Office – The county office where veteran service officers help local veterans file and track claims and connect to state benefits at no cost. 2380 Washington Boulevard, Ogden, UT 84401. Phone: 801-399-8406
Assistance for Veterans facing Housing Insecurity
Ogden sits within Utah’s Balance of State Continuum of Care, the HUD region covering Weber County and most of the state. Its 2025 Point-in-Time count recorded 39 veterans within the 1,429 people who were homeless on one night this past January. But many more, while not unhoused, could be at risk of losing their home due to poverty.
More than once we have traced a family’s housing crisis straight back to a VA payment that was wrongly denied. That is why veterans who are homeless or close to it hold a special place in our work at Hill & Ponton. We make at-risk veterans our priority.
Are you facing hardship and housing insecurity because the VA rejected your claim or left you with a rating that sits too low? Hill & Ponton is ready to push back. You pay nothing up front, and a fee is due only if your appeal succeeds. Call us and we will evaluate your case at no charge.
Meet Our Expert Legal Team
VA Disability Attorneys and professionals championing veterans in Ogden, Utah and nationwide.
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Need help appealing a VA decision? Contact our VA disability lawyers for a free evaluation of your claim.
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