On March 30, 2021, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) announced that the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 (VEVRAA) hiring grade for 2021 would be 5.6 percent. This is a 0.1 percent reduction from the 5.7 percentage benchmark in 2020–making it the seventh decrease of the benchmark since its inception in 2014. The new hiring grade is effective as of March 31, 2021.
VEVRAA requires contractors with written affirmative action programs (AAPs) to establish more individualized hiring benchmarks for protected veterans annually or adopt OFCCP’s yearly national benchmark within their AAPs. As a result of this requirement, contractors need to compare the proportion of their workers who are protected veterans in all their institutions to whichever hiring benchmark they use. Contractors may use these comparisons to estimate the effectiveness of the outreach and recruitment efforts from the hiring of veterans.
