Plain rules.
Applied the same way to everyone.

Who can review

Anyone who signs in with an email link. One review per person per location; you can update yours anytime.

What we show

“Veteran · branch · month visited”. Never your name or email.

When a score appears

After 3 reviews. One bad day, or one great one, shouldn't define a location.

How the score is figured

The average of every published review across the four categories. No paid placement, no hidden weighting.

What gets held

Reviews with a phone number, a Social Security number, or a staff member’s name go to a moderator before posting. So does any review reported by three people.

VA staff replies

Verified staff can post one public reply under a review of their own location. Replies can’t change, hide, or reorder reviews or scores, and staff reports on their own location’s reviews don’t count toward hiding them.

Check-ins

About three months after a review is posted or updated, we ask the reviewer once whether anything has changed. Their answer shows on the review as “still accurate” or “updated, was 2.0”. Reviewers can turn these emails off.

“This helped me”

Signed-in Veterans can mark a review as helpful. The count is shown to readers and to the reviewer, but it never changes scores or the order of reviews.

What gets removed

Threats, personal attacks, private medical details about someone else, and reviews of a location the reviewer clearly never visited.

RateMyVA is independent. It is not run by, funded by, or affiliated with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. To give feedback directly to the VA, contact the Patient Advocate at that facility.