Disabled Veteran Benefits in Massachusetts

Massachusetts sets its veteran exemptions as fixed dollar amounts that come straight off the tax bill, not off the assessed value. A service-connected rating of 10% or more is worth $400 a year. A 100% rating is worth $1,000. Veterans who needed specially adapted housing after a total disability get $1,500. A full exemption exists, but only for veterans who are paraplegic or rated 100% for service-connected blindness, and for the unremarried surviving spouses of those who died from their service.

Your town may pay more. Under the HERO Act, passed in August 2024, a city or town can vote to double these amounts, which would take the 100% exemption from $1,000 to $2,000, and can vote to raise them each year with inflation. Both are local choices, so ask your assessor what your community has adopted.

You apply to your local board of assessors every year, and the deadline is strict: April 1, or three months after the tax bills are mailed if that is later. You must own the home and live in it as your domicile, and have lived in Massachusetts for six months before you entered service or for two years in a row before the tax year. The veterans office's own page still says five years; the statute and the Department of Revenue say two.

This is the headline benefit and it is simple. If you have a 100% service-connected disability, or the VA pays you at the 100% rate, the state sends you one annuity check a year of $2,500. The HERO Act raised it from $2,000.

You must be a Massachusetts resident when you apply and stay one while you receive it, and your discharge cannot be dishonorable. The annuity also goes to Gold Star parents and to surviving spouses, and since July 1, 2025 a surviving spouse keeps it even after remarrying.

It does not start by itself. You file a Veteran Annuity Application with the Executive Office of Veterans Services, online, by email, by mail or in person with your local Veterans' Service Officer, and you include your DD Form 214 and your VA rating decision. New applications must be received and approved by June 30.

Since the HERO Act, the Registry of Motor Vehicles goes by the VA's decision. If the VA rates you 100% or finds you unemployable because of a service-connected disability, you pay no excise tax on one passenger vehicle or pick-up truck that you own and use for non-commercial purposes. The same two groups pay no registration fees on any vehicle they are listed as an owner of and no driver's license transaction fees. Special plate fees, title fees, permit and road test fees still apply.

Disabled Veteran plates are a separate test and a harder one. You need to qualify for permanent disabled parking and have a rating of at least 60%, made up of conditions that affect your ability to walk.

Those plates unlock one more thing: no sales tax on one vehicle. The veteran must get DV plates for that vehicle, and sales tax is due on any others.

Your VA disability compensation is safe from the state income tax. Federal law exempts veterans' disability compensation, disability pensions and GI Bill benefits from federal and state tax, and the state's own budget documents say plainly that Massachusetts is not permitted to tax them.

Military retirement pay gets the same result by state rule. U.S. military pensions are excluded from Massachusetts gross income, for residents and nonresidents alike.

The veteran's own benefit is real. A Massachusetts veteran can have full or partial tuition waived for state-supported undergraduate degree and certificate courses at a public college or university, on a space-available basis. You need a year of Massachusetts residency and no defaulted federal student loans. Know the catch: the waiver covers tuition, not campus fees. The veterans' representative at the college handles it.

People search for dependent education benefits here, and the honest answer is that Massachusetts ties them to a death, not to a rating. The state's Public Service Scholarship goes to children of veterans who were killed in action or died as a result of their service, and to children of prisoners of war and those missing in action in Southeast Asia. The Children of Fallen Service Member Waiver covers the total cost of tuition and fees for a child of a service member killed on active duty. Neither page offers anything to the family of a living veteran on the strength of a disability rating.

If you serve in the Massachusetts National Guard, both tuition and fees are waived at state schools.

Massachusetts state parks are free to enter for everyone. What costs money is parking, and that is where the veteran benefit sits. Daily parking fees are waived at all state park facilities for vehicles with Disabled Veteran plates, Purple Heart plates, or disability plates or placards. Any veteran plate also lets you use the veterans-only parking spaces at several parks.

Hunting and fishing are a different story, and it is a no. MassWildlife's free fishing license goes to residents 70 and older and to people who are blind, have an intellectual disability or have paraplegia. Its free hunting license is for hunters with paraplegia. A VA disability rating is not on the fee table at any percentage. A veteran with paraplegia qualifies on that ground, with a physician's certification.