If you run hiring for a federal contractor, you have probably seen the term "VEVRAA hiring benchmark" on a compliance checklist. Then you went looking for the current percentage and found a mess. One source says 5.9%. Another says 5.5%. A third says 5.4%. They are all wrong, and they are all right. They are just from different years.

Here is the part nobody explains well. The VEVRAA national hiring benchmark is not a fixed number. It changes every single year. The figure floating around the internet is almost always stale.

The current VEVRAA national hiring benchmark is 5.1%, effective July 30, 2025. That is the number you use right now. This guide explains what that figure actually is, why it drops most years, how you use it, and what really happens if your veteran hires come in below it. Spoiler: missing the benchmark is not an automatic violation.

What Is the VEVRAA Hiring Benchmark?

VEVRAA is the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act. It requires federal contractors and subcontractors to take steps to recruit and hire protected veterans. The hiring benchmark is one piece of that.

The benchmark is a yardstick, not a quota. It gives you a target to measure your veteran outreach against. Each year, you compare the share of veterans you hired to the benchmark. The veterans counted are those who fall into the four protected categories under VEVRAA. See our guide on what is a protected veteran and the four categories for the exact definitions. If you fall short, you look at your outreach efforts and figure out what to improve.

That word "yardstick" matters. The U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) runs this program. OFCCP has been clear for years that the benchmark is a self-assessment tool. You are not required to hit it. You are required to track it, try to reach it, and document the good-faith effort.

The rule lives at 41 CFR 60-300.45. It gives you two ways to set your benchmark. You can use the national number that OFCCP publishes. Or you can build your own using a five-factor method. We will cover both.

Why Does the VEVRAA Benchmark Change Every Year?

This is the question that trips up most HR teams. The benchmark moves because it is tied to live labor-force data, not a fixed policy choice.

The national benchmark equals the percentage of veterans in the civilian labor force. OFCCP pulls that figure from federal data. The main inputs are veteran labor-force data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The figures come from the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey run by BLS with the Census Bureau. You can see the underlying veteran employment data on the BLS Current Population Survey pages.

Here is why it keeps dropping. The veteran share of the workforce is shrinking. The large Vietnam-era and Cold War cohorts are aging out and retiring. Fewer people serve today than in past generations. So the slice of the workforce that counts as veterans gets smaller each year.

That is the whole reason the number changes. It is math on a shrinking population, recalculated yearly. The 2025 figure of 5.1% was a small drop from the 2024 figure of 5.2%. It has declined nearly every year since the rule took effect in 2014.

Why Is the Number So Confusing Online?

Run a search for the VEVRAA benchmark and you will get a wall of conflicting figures. 5.9%, 5.7%, 5.5%, 5.4%, 5.2%. People are not lying. They are quoting old years.

Because the figure updates annually, any blog or compliance article that has not been refreshed is showing you a number that is no longer in force. A page written in 2019 might say 5.9%. That was correct in 2019. It is wrong now.

This is the single biggest mistake I see HR teams make with VEVRAA. They copy a benchmark figure from an old vendor PDF or a stale internal template. Then their affirmative action plan cites the wrong number for the year. An auditor notices that fast.

The fix is simple. Never trust a benchmark number that does not come with an effective date. The current figure is 5.1%, effective July 30, 2025. Before you lock it into a plan, confirm it on the OFCCP website for your plan year. OFCCP posts the new number each year, usually in the summer.

National Benchmark or Five-Factor Method: Which Should You Use?

The rule gives you two paths. Most contractors take the easy one.

Option one is the national benchmark. You adopt the figure OFCCP publishes. Right now that is 5.1%. You write it into your affirmative action plan and you are done. No math, no extra data work. This is what the large majority of contractors choose, because it is simple and it is defensible.

Option two is the five-factor method. You build your own benchmark using your local and industry data. The five factors are spelled out in 41 CFR 60-300.45. Those factors cover the veteran share of your state's labor force, your veteran applicant and hire rates, and your outreach results.

The five-factor method takes real work. You need clean applicant and hire data broken out by veteran status. Most midsize contractors do not have the data systems to make it worth the effort. The national number is the practical default.

Whichever path you pick, you document it in your affirmative action plan and you assess your results against it once a year. If you want a step-by-step on tracking your own figure and the applicant data behind it, read our companion guide on what contractors track for the OFCCP veteran hiring benchmark.

What Happens If You Miss the Benchmark?

This is the fear that keeps HR leads up at night. It should not. Missing the benchmark is not an automatic violation.

Let me say that again, because it is the most misunderstood part of VEVRAA. Coming in under 5.1% does not break the law. The benchmark is not a quota. OFCCP cannot penalize you simply for hiring fewer veterans than the figure.

What missing it does is trigger a closer look. If your veteran hire rate falls below the benchmark, you are expected to examine your outreach and recruitment efforts. You ask what is working, what is not, and what you will change. In an audit, OFCCP reviews those good-faith efforts. They want to see that you tried, that you tracked it, and that you adjusted.

So the real risk is not the percentage. The real risk is having no documented effort behind it. A contractor at 4% with documented outreach is in far better shape. A contractor at 5.5% with nothing on paper is the one at risk.

How Is This Different From the OFCCP Benchmark Contractors Track?

People mix up two things here, so let me draw the line clearly.

The national VEVRAA hiring benchmark is the single percentage OFCCP publishes for the whole country. That is the 5.1% figure. It is the same for every contractor that adopts the national option. This article is about that number, where it comes from, and why it moves.

The benchmark you track inside your own plan is a different layer. That is your veteran hire rate, your applicant data, your outreach records, and how all of that stacks up against whichever benchmark you chose. Two contractors using the same 5.1% national figure will track wildly different internal data.

Think of it this way. The national benchmark is the line on the wall. What you track is your own measurement against that line, year over year. You need both. The national figure tells you the target. Your tracking tells you whether you hit it and what you did about it.

Is VEVRAA Still in Force in 2026?

Worth addressing head-on, because the regulatory picture has been noisy. VEVRAA is a federal statute. It was passed by Congress and it remains in force in 2026. The hiring benchmark requirement under it has not gone away.

There has been a lot of movement around executive orders and affirmative action policy. Some of that touched OFCCP's enforcement posture and rulemaking. But a statute like VEVRAA is not erased by an executive order. The underlying obligations for covered federal contractors still stand.

A few thresholds to keep straight, because they get confused with the benchmark:

Because the policy environment keeps shifting, confirm the current requirements for your plan year directly with OFCCP or DOL VETS. The statute is steady. The enforcement details can move.

How Do You Actually Hit the Benchmark?

The benchmark is a number. Hitting it comes down to one thing: a steady flow of qualified veteran candidates into your pipeline. You cannot hire veterans you never reach.

This is where most midsize contractors stall. They post on a general job board, get a few veteran applicants by luck, and then wonder why their numbers sit below the benchmark. Reaching veterans takes a deliberate sourcing channel, not hope.

A few moves that actually move the number:

Sourcing is the bottleneck, not the benchmark math. For a fuller plan, see our veteran recruiting strategy and talent acquisition playbook and our guide on where to post jobs to reach qualified veteran candidates. If you hold government services contracts, the cleared-talent angle in recruiting veterans for government services and contracts is worth a read. And for the broader compliance picture, our VEVRAA compliance guide for federal contractors ties it together.

Where Veteran Candidates Come From

The hardest part of meeting any veteran benchmark is supply. You need real candidates, in volume, in the fields you hire for. That is the gap BMR fills.

BMR is a veteran talent platform. Our pool grows by over 1,000 new veteran and military-spouse profiles every month. We have helped build more than 60,000 resumes. That means a steady, growing stream of candidates who have already translated their military experience into terms your hiring team can act on.

The pool runs deep in the fields midsize contractors hire for most. Program and project management. IT and cybersecurity. Logistics and supply chain. Cleared defense and government-services talent. Security and emergency management. When your benchmark assessment shows a thin veteran pipeline, the fastest fix is a better source.

You do the compliance math. We help fill the funnel that makes the math work. Reach out to access BMR's veteran talent pool and start putting qualified veterans in front of your hiring team.