VA Lighthouse
VA Lighthouse is the US Department of Veterans Affairs' developer API platform. Published at developer.va.gov with production endpoints at api.va.gov, Lighthouse exposes 22+ APIs covering Benefits (claims, documents, reference data, intake), Health (HL7 FHIR R4 Patient Health and Clinical Health, Community Care Eligibility), Facilities, Forms, Veteran Verification and Confirmation, Appeals and Decision Reviews under the Appeals Modernization Act (AMA), Address Validation, Direct Deposit Management, VA Letter Generation, Education Benefits, and the full VA Home Loan Guaranty stack (Loan Guaranty, Loan Review, Guaranty Remittance, Health-Care-Costs Coverage). All authenticated APIs use OAuth 2.0 with both Authorization Code (Veteran consent) and Client Credentials (system) flows; the health APIs additionally support SMART-on-FHIR. The platform is operated by the VA Office of the CTO with open-source backend code in github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-api and reference clients in vets-api-clients.
Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.
API Evangelist profiles VA Lighthouse the way a machine reads it — 85 machine-readable artifacts across 35 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — VA Lighthouse scores 49.4/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 41/100 (agent aware). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile VA Lighthouse
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for VA Lighthouse. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 35
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Decision Reviews API
Composite of the three AMA decision-review filing endpoints — Higher-Level Review (HLR), Supplemental Claim (SC), and Notice of Disagreement (Board Appeal / NOD) — for submittin...
Education Benefits API
School Certifying Officials (SCOs) and education benefit administrators read and submit GI Bill / Post-9/11 education benefit enrollment data — VA Form 22-1999 enrollment certif...
Loan Guaranty API
Provides lenders and servicers the digital surface for the VA Home Loan Guaranty program — eligibility, appraisals, loan setup, and certificate-of-eligibility (COE) operations. ...
Guaranty Remittance API
Lets VA Loan Guaranty servicers remit funding-fee, late, and other Loan Guaranty payments to VA electronically instead of through legacy paper-based remittance. Client credentia...
Health Care Costs Coverage API
Insurance-coordination API for VA's Consolidated Patient Account Center (CPAC) — submit and update third-party health insurance coverage on a Veteran's record so VA can correctl...
VA Lighthouse 5103 Waiver API
Allows authenticated and authorized users to file a 5103 Notice Response on a claim.
VA Lighthouse ACA Coverage API
The ACA Coverage API from VA Lighthouse — 1 operation(s) for aca coverage.
VA Lighthouse AddressValidation-v3 API
Address Standardization and Validation endpoints
VA Lighthouse Appealable Issues API
The Appealable Issues API from VA Lighthouse — 1 operation(s) for appealable issues.
VA Lighthouse Appeals Status API
Caseflow appeals status API
VA Lighthouse Claims API
Allows authenticated and authorized users to access claims data for a single claim by ID, or for all claims based on claimant data. No data is returned if the user is not authen...
VA Lighthouse DirectDeposit API
The DirectDeposit API from VA Lighthouse — 1 operation(s) for directdeposit.
VA Lighthouse Disability API
Used for 526 claims.
VA Lighthouse Disability Compensation Claims API
Allows authenticated and authorized users to automatically establish a Disability Compensation Claim (21-526EZ) in VBMS
VA Lighthouse Disability Rating API
The Disability Rating API from VA Lighthouse — 4 operation(s) for disability rating.
VA Lighthouse Documents Service API
The Documents Service API from VA Lighthouse — 9 operation(s) for documents service.
VA Lighthouse Enrolled Benefits API
The Enrolled Benefits API from VA Lighthouse — 1 operation(s) for enrolled benefits.
VA Lighthouse facilities API
VA Facilities API
VA Lighthouse Flashes API
The Flashes API from VA Lighthouse — 1 operation(s) for flashes.
VA Lighthouse Forms API
The Forms API from VA Lighthouse — 2 operation(s) for forms.
VA Lighthouse Intent to File API
Used for 0966 submissions.
VA Lighthouse JWS Validation API
The JWS Validation API from VA Lighthouse — 1 operation(s) for jws validation.
VA Lighthouse Legacy Appeals API
The Legacy Appeals API from VA Lighthouse — 1 operation(s) for legacy appeals.
VA Lighthouse Letters API
The Letters API from VA Lighthouse — 3 operation(s) for letters.
VA Lighthouse loanReviewPublic API
Loan Review Public Resource
VA Lighthouse Path API
The Path API from VA Lighthouse — 1 operation(s) for path.
VA Lighthouse Permanent And Total Disability API
The Permanent And Total Disability API from VA Lighthouse — 2 operation(s) for permanent and total disability.
VA Lighthouse Power of Attorney API
Used for 21-22 and 21-22a form submissions.
VA Lighthouse Reference Data API
The Reference Data API from VA Lighthouse — 9 operation(s) for reference data.
VA Lighthouse Search API
The Search API from VA Lighthouse — 1 operation(s) for search.
VA Lighthouse Service History API
The Service History API from VA Lighthouse — 1 operation(s) for service history.
VA Lighthouse Status API
The Status API from VA Lighthouse — 2 operation(s) for status.
VA Lighthouse Uploads API
The Uploads API from VA Lighthouse — 5 operation(s) for uploads.
VA Lighthouse veteran_confirmation_status API
Veteran Confirmation - Veteran Status
VA Lighthouse Veteran Verification API
The Veteran Verification API from VA Lighthouse — 3 operation(s) for veteran verification.
Scroll within the panel for all 35 ·
Open Collections 23
Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.
Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).
Address Validation
OPEN COLLECTIONAppealable Issues
OPEN COLLECTIONAppeals
OPEN COLLECTIONAppeals Status
OPEN COLLECTIONBenefits Claims
OPEN COLLECTIONBenefits Claims
OPEN COLLECTIONBenefits Documents Service API
OPEN COLLECTIONBenefits Intake
OPEN COLLECTIONBenefits Data Lookup API
OPEN COLLECTIONCommunity Care Eligibility
OPEN COLLECTIONDirect Deposit Management API
OPEN COLLECTIONVA Facilities
OPEN COLLECTIONVA Facilities
OPEN COLLECTIONVA Forms
OPEN COLLECTIONLegacy Appeals
OPEN COLLECTIONVA Loan Guaranty - Loan Review REST API
OPEN COLLECTIONAPI Collection
OPEN COLLECTIONVA Letter Generator API
OPEN COLLECTIONVeteran Confirmation
OPEN COLLECTIONVeteran Confirmation
OPEN COLLECTIONVeteran Verification
OPEN COLLECTIONVeteran Verification
OPEN COLLECTIONVeteran Service History and Eligibility API
OPEN COLLECTIONScroll within the panel for all 23 ·
Features 21
The notable capabilities this provider advertises, captured as structured features so they can be searched and compared instead of read one landing page at a time.
Notable capabilities this provider offers.
Scroll within the panel for all 21 ·
Semantic Vocabularies 1
JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Va Gov Context
JSON-LDSecurity Posture 3
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Scopes 1
OAuth scopes are the vocabulary of least-privilege access. Profiling them shows exactly what an integration — or an agent acting on a user's behalf — is allowed to do.
OAuth scopes governing access to this provider's APIs.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Resources
Every other property we hold for VA Lighthouse — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Get Started 5
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Documentation 8
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Scroll within the panel for all 8 ·
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Build 9
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Scroll within the panel for all 9 ·
Access & Security 9
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Scroll within the panel for all 9 ·
Operate 3
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 3
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 2
The organization behind the API
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/va-gov · machine-readable index on apis.io