If You're Behind on a VA Mortgage, Catching Up Now Costs 0%. Your Servicer Has Until November to Offer It.

If you have a VA home loan and you’ve fallen behind, there’s now a way to get current that charges you nothing. No interest. No monthly payment. Your original rate stays exactly where it is.

You can’t apply for it. Your servicer has to put you in.

How it works

The VA launched the Partial Claim Program on June 15, under the VA Home Loan Reform Act signed in July 2025. Your servicer identifies you as in default, or at imminent risk of it, and puts you on a three-month trial payment plan.

Make those three payments and the servicer pays off everything you owe to bring the loan current. The VA then reimburses the servicer for that same amount.

What you owed doesn’t vanish. It moves. It becomes a separate lien sitting behind your mortgage, carrying no interest and no monthly payment. You settle it when you sell the house, refinance the VA loan, or pay the mortgage off. Up to 25% of your unpaid principal balance, or 30% if the missed payments land in the COVID window, March 1, 2020 through May 1, 2025.

Why the structure matters more than the program

Compare it to the usual fix. A loan modification takes what you’re behind, folds it into the balance, and re-amortizes the whole thing at a current rate.

If you locked a VA loan at 3% in 2021, that’s a catastrophe dressed as help. Freddie Mac put the 30-year average at 6.66% this week. Rolling arrears into a modification at that number reprices your entire mortgage for the next thirty years, all to fix a few missed payments.

The partial claim doesn’t touch your rate. That’s the whole design, and it’s a genuinely good deal. Rare thing to be able to write. If you want to see the gap for yourself, put your balance into our mortgage calculator at your current rate and then at 6.66%, and look at the monthly difference.

Here’s the catch, and it’s a real one. Submissions opened June 15, but servicers have until November 28, 2026 to finish building this into their systems. So whether you get offered a partial claim between now and then comes down to whether the company that cashes your payment did the work yet. And since you can’t go to the VA directly, their backlog is your problem.

Do this now

Call your servicer’s loss mitigation department, not general customer service. Ask whether they’re processing VA partial claims yet, and ask to be evaluated for the Partial Claim Program by name. Don’t ask for “help” or “options.” Named programs get logged. Vague requests get a brochure.

Expect a standard loss mitigation packet: income documents, a hardship letter, recent bank statements. Fill it out the week you get it, because the three-month trial can’t start until they have it.

If your servicer stalls, says the program doesn’t exist, or steers you toward a modification without mentioning the partial claim, call the VA Regional Loan Center at 877-827-3702 and tell them your servicer won’t evaluate you. The VA guarantees the loan, so it has leverage your servicer would rather you didn’t use.

File this away if you’re current: the program runs five years, through July 30, 2030. It costs a borrower nothing in interest, and most of the people it was built for have never heard of it.

Say the words “Partial Claim Program” out loud on the call, and make them write it down.

How Candid Yak makes money. Some of the products we write about pay us if you apply or sign up through our links. That never changes our verdict, our rankings, or the numbers in this article. We call a bad deal a bad deal whether it pays us or not. Some brands shown in our comparison tools are placeholder examples while we finalize partner agreements, and we label them as such.