How we check

Every page here carries a date. This explains what that date is promising, and just as importantly what it is not.

The date means somebody opened the page that day

A verification date is not the day the article was written, and not the year printed in the title. It is the day the rates, thresholds and coverage rules in the body were read off the thing that sets them: the statute, the Code of Federal Regulations, a state labor department, the US Department of Labor.

Anything older than its stamp has not been re-checked since. That is the honest position, and in a field where a rule can be struck down between one payroll and the next it is more than almost anyone else will tell you.

Read at the source, not from the middle of the chain

A wage figure in this field travels. The agency publishes it, a payroll vendor writes it into a blog post, a law firm summarises the vendor, an HR software company builds a state guide out of the summaries. Four steps later the number is on forty sites and a court vacated the rule behind it in November.

So the rule is to find the text that actually binds, read it, and cite it. Those sources are tagged OFFICIAL in the list at the foot of every article, so you can see how much of a page rests on primary material rather than on somebody's summary of it.

In effect, scheduled, blocked: a status is a claim with an expiry date

A rule here can be enacted and not yet in force, in force and then enjoined, reinstated on appeal, or superseded by an amendment nobody wrote about. Most state rates change on 1 January, which means that on one night every rate on this site goes stale at once.

A page that says a rule binds today is therefore making a claim that can become false without anyone touching the article. Those pages carry a machine-readable status, and the publishing system refuses to accept one unless the same article is also entered on a re-check list with a date on it. A rule described as scheduled must name the day it starts, or the site does not build. An unattended "in effect" is treated as a defect, not a detail.

What the software refuses to publish

Editorial standards that live only in someone's head get skipped on a busy day. These are enforced by the build: if an article breaks them, the site does not compile and there is nothing to upload.

• No article may have an empty source list, and at least two sources must be primary: the rule itself, or the agency that enforces it.
• No article may publish without saying, in its own words, that it is not legal advice. Every page here describes what one person owes another, and the answer always turns on facts about one workplace.
• No article may be missing a verification date or a summary block.
• A verification date in the future is rejected outright. You cannot have checked something tomorrow.
• A verification date more than a week older than the publication date is rejected. A stamp that sat in a drawer is not a check.
• Publication dates cannot be set ahead, so a run of articles cannot be back-filled to fake a schedule.
• Before publishing, every hourly rate, salary threshold, effective date, employee-count trigger and regulation citation in the body is looked for in the cited sources, which are fetched again at that moment rather than trusted from earlier. Cents count: $7.25 and $7.50 are checked as different claims. A figure that cannot be found has to be hedged, labeled, or removed.

Unverified means unverified

Sometimes the administering page is vague, is a PDF that cannot be read, or contradicts another page run by the same agency. When that happens the number is labeled as unverified in the text, and most articles end with a short list of exactly what has not been confirmed.

Copying a figure from another site and presenting it as checked would be the one thing that makes this whole project pointless, so it does not happen. An admitted gap is the cost of the stamp meaning anything.

Corrections

Allocations run out, rules get rewritten mid-year, and a state that was open last month can be closed today. When something here turns out to be wrong or out of date it gets fixed and the verification date is reset to the day of the re-check, so a corrected page cannot hide behind an old stamp.

If you have hit something that does not match reality, especially if you were told no when this site said yes, please write: contact@laborverified.com. The state, the program and the date help more than anything else.

What this is not

It is not tax advice and not an application service. It reports what programs say about themselves. Whether a credit applies to your return is a question for a tax professional; whether your home qualifies is a question for the program. See About for who runs this and Privacy for what the site does and does not collect.