Editorial Standards

This page describes the rules the site actually operates under — not aspirations. Where a rule is enforced by the software itself, we say so.

Sourcing

• Primary sources only for figures. Tax brackets come from IRS revenue procedures and state revenue departments. Wage bases come from the Social Security Administration. Overtime rules come from the Department of Labor and state labor codes. We do not source figures from other calculator sites, news articles or forums.
• Sources are cited on the page. Every calculator lists the publications its figures come from, with links, in a Sources section.
• External links point to the authority, not to intermediaries — IRS.gov, SSA.gov, state agencies, the CFPB.

Verification and the provisional flag

Every jurisdiction-specific dataset in our codebase carries a verification flag and a “last verified” date. When a figure has not yet been checked against its primary source for the current year, the flag is off — and the software forces a visible “provisional figures” banner onto every calculator that depends on it. The banner cannot be removed by forgetting; it can only be removed by verifying the data.

Rates that change annually (federal brackets, the Social Security wage base, contribution limits) are re-verified each year when the IRS and SSA publish the new figures, and the “last verified” date shown on each page is updated to the date a human actually checked.

Limitations are stated, not hidden

Every calculator includes a section on what it leaves out — local income taxes, W-4 effects, exemptions, plan-specific rules. We consider an honest boundary more useful than an impression of completeness, and we would rather lose a comparison on feature count than win it by implying precision we do not have.

Independence

Advertising, if shown, is visually distinct from content and has no influence over calculator logic, data or editorial conclusions. We do not accept payment for rankings, recommendations or figures. Content involving any commercial relationship will be labeled on the page it appears.

Corrections

If you find an error — a stale rate, a wrong threshold, a state rule we have mischaracterized — emailhello@statesidecalc.com with the page URL and, if you have it, the primary source. Confirmed factual errors are corrected in the data, the page's “last verified” date is updated, and material corrections are noted on the affected page.

What this site does not do

• No personalized tax, legal or financial advice.
• No collection of the numbers you type — calculations run in your browser and are never transmitted to us. See the privacy policy.
• No content designed to answer a question worse than the official source does. Where the authority's own tool is better, we link to it.