How we get our numbers
Almost every number on this site changes. Medicare premiums are announced in the fall. Social Security benefits are adjusted each October. Income thresholds drift with inflation, and the surcharge added to your Medicare premium is decided by a tax return you filed two years ago. A site about numbers like these is only as good as its habits, so this page describes ours in full — including the parts that cost us pages.
Every figure lives in a rule pack
Nothing here is typed from memory, copied from another website, or carried over from last year because it probably did not change. Each set of official figures lives in a small, dated file we call a rule pack. A pack holds the numbers and, right beside them, the things that make the numbers checkable: the agency that published them, a link to the exact document they came from, the year they take effect, the date they are expected to be replaced, and the date a person sat down and compared them to the source.
When a new year is announced, we do not edit last year's pack. We add a new one. The old pack stays exactly as it was, which is why a page about a past year can still show you what that year actually held — and why nothing on this site can quietly change under you.
Every pack is listed, with its source and its dates, on our sources page — 69 packs today, 54 of them verified. The same data is published in machine-readable form, so anyone, including an AI assistant that quotes us, can check our work rather than take our word for it.
We never mark a figure verified without opening the source
Verified has one meaning here. A person opened the document named in the pack, on the date recorded in the pack, and checked the figures against it. It does not mean the number looked about right. It does not mean three other websites agree. It does not mean an earlier version of the same table said the same thing.
This rule has a cost, and we pay it rather than bend it. When a source cannot be opened — an agency reorganizes its site, a table moves behind a portal, a state stops publishing a figure it used to publish — the pack stays unverified and the page it would have fed does not go up. We would rather be missing a page than be confidently wrong on one.
The four statuses, and what each one means for you
Verified
A person opened the official document named in the pack, on the date recorded in the pack, and checked every figure against it line by line.
What it means for you: You can rely on this figure, and you can follow the link and confirm it yourself in about a minute.
Projected
The agency has not announced these figures yet. We computed them from inputs that have been published, using a method we describe on the page itself.
What it means for you: Useful for planning the shape of next year. Not a figure to budget to the dollar, and it always says so beside the number.
Pending
We could not open or confirm the source, so the pack holds no data. Nothing built on it is published.
What it means for you: You will not see a page at all, rather than an empty table with a promise attached.
Stale
The pack is past the date we expected it to be replaced, and the replacement is not published yet.
What it means for you: The page still shows the old figures, with a banner saying plainly that an update is overdue. Stale never fails quietly.
Why a projected figure always carries its label beside it
People read tables the way people read tables: they find their row, take the number, and leave. Screenshots travel. Printouts get carried to appointments. A disclaimer at the bottom of the page does not go with the figure, so on this site the projection label rides beside the number itself, in every table, every result, and every printed sheet.
A projection also never graduates into a fact by being edited. When the agency announces the real figures, they arrive as a new, separately verified pack, and the projection is replaced rather than quietly promoted. Right now, 2026 figures are announced; 2027 figures are not, and anywhere you see them they will say so.
Why a state we cannot verify earns no page at all
It is tempting to publish a page for all fifty states and leave three of them nearly empty, because a complete-looking set of pages performs better in search results. We do not do it. An empty page costs you a trip: you searched, you clicked, you read a heading with your state's name on it, and then you found a blank table and a note asking you to check back. That is worse than not finding us at all.
So a state whose figures we cannot verify has no page here. It has something else instead: a written record of what we tried, what stopped us, and when we will try again. When the source becomes available, the page appears on its own, already verified.
When the best available source is not the government
Two subjects on this site have no government source, and pretending otherwise would be the real dishonesty. Nobody in Washington publishes what assisted living costs in your county, or what a funeral typically runs. For those figures we use named private surveys: the annual Cost of Care Survey now run by CareScout, formerly published by Genworth, and the price survey published by the National Funeral Directors Association.
These are industry sources. The organizations behind them have a commercial interest in the fields they measure, and you deserve to weigh that yourself, so we never let those figures stand in the same clothes as a federal table. They carry a different stamp, they name the survey and its year, and the page says in plain words that this is an industry survey rather than an official table. Our directory of free state counseling programs is handled the same way: it comes from the national SHIP technical assistance center, which is funded by the Administration for Community Living but is not itself a federal register.
We use them because the alternative is silence on the questions families most need answered before a hard conversation. A survey with a published method, named openly, beats a number with no origin — and beats leaving you to guess.
When we get something wrong
We will. Sources get misread, a table gets transcribed a row off, an update gets missed. When it happens we fix the figure and we write down what was wrong, for how long, and what changed — in public, on our corrections page. A site that never shows a correction is not a site that never made a mistake.
Two related pages: every source we use, listed with its dates, and our editorial policy, which covers who writes this and how the site is paid for.