How we source, check and publish
These rules apply to every topic on the site, including ones not yet written. They are what make a figure here checkable against the document it came from.
Primary sources only
Every number traces to the document that issued it: a CMS fact sheet, an SSA POMS section, a Federal Register notice, a BLS series. We do not cite insurance brokers, comparison sites or general-interest finance media. We cite the issuing document rather than a secondary site that has copied it.
Every source we use is listed on Sources, with its publication date.
Nothing unverified gets published
Figures live in data files, not in page copy, and each carries its own verification state. Until a figure has been checked against its primary source, the build marks the whole site noindex and blocks crawling rather than presenting an unchecked number as fact. That is enforced in the build, not by memory.
A separate check compares every published figure against the primary-source audit on each build, so a value cannot drift by a stray edit. Where a figure has not been published by the issuing agency yet, we say so and show what is missing rather than filling the gap with an estimate.
We compute; we don’t advise
Nobody here is a financial advisor, tax preparer, insurance agent or attorney, and we do not pretend otherwise. So the tools do arithmetic on figures you enter and name the tradeoff — never “you should do this.”
In practice that is the difference between “consider a Roth conversion” and “converting $40,000 would put you $8,000 over the next threshold, costing $1,735 a year.” The second states the figure; the first states a course of action.
Published figures beat derived ones
Where an agency publishes an amount, we print that amount — even when the underlying formula would let us compute it ourselves. Derivations drift from published values in small ways, and a reader who checks us against the source and finds a mismatch has no way to know it was only rounding.
Where we do derive something, we show the arithmetic and label it as derived.
Corrections
Every number is traceable and lives in one file, so an error here can be checked against the document it came from and fixed in one place rather than across a dozen pages. Where the two differ, the document is correct.
Numbers are not changed without a record. Figures carry the date of the document they came from, so you can see what a page is based on.
What we will not do
We do not sell insurance, take commissions, or pass your details to an agent. No tool asks for your email before it works. Calculators run entirely in your browser, so figures you enter are never sent anywhere. See About for how the site is funded.
Topic methodology
The rules above are general. The arithmetic specific to each subject lives with that subject: