Publication threshold
A state page requires each of the three rules — a simplified procedure, a court-cost rule and an executor compensation rule — to be either verified against a primary source or recorded as an explicit unknown that names the section and what to read next. What is never published is a silent gap, because a missing part a reader cannot see invites them to assume it is settled.
Fields that could not be verified are labelled unknown, carry a reason, and are excluded from every calculation. They are never defaulted to zero, to an average, or to a neighbouring state’s value.
The source list contains 269 primary legal sources and records the date each was checked. The source verification guide explains how to follow a citation, compare the quotation and find conditions that affect your estate.
Quotation standard
A quotation is the source’s exact words. Condensing several clauses into one readable sentence and presenting it inside quotation marks is not permitted, even when the resulting number is correct, because it misrepresents what the law says.
All 269 quotations are compared with the publisher’s own text. Summaries are labelled as explanations, so you can distinguish this site’s description from the legal wording. The correction log records a previous correction of quotations that had been paraphrased.
Verification standard
Each published figure is tied to named conditions that must appear in the live source. A citation alone is not sufficient, because a citation records where someone intended to look rather than what was found there.
The source list records the government URL, any edition or effective date the publisher prints, and the date this site checked it. If a publisher provides no version or effective date, that absence remains visible in the record rather than being inferred.
Links to court-published forms and fee schedules are checked before publication. Broken links must be repaired or replaced with directions to the court. Sending someone who is settling an estate to a dead government link is a real cost, not a cosmetic defect.
Authority separation
Government sources establish legal facts. Commercial products in this category are studied for how they present information and are never used as a source for what the law is. No figure, threshold, rate, or deadline on this site is derived from another company’s summary.
No implied professional review
Content is not described as attorney-reviewed unless a named licensed attorney has reviewed that specific material and authorised the statement. The current pilot makes no such claim and displays no such badge.
Similarly, no page claims to be the best, the most accurate, or ranked first. Those claims are unverifiable, and this site’s entire argument is that unverifiable claims are the problem.
Commercial independence
Advertisers and affiliate partners cannot select a route, alter a calculation, suppress a caveat, or buy placement. No commercial links are active and no ad serves. The site is in ad-network site verification: pages carry the network’s site-verification snippet and ads.txt carries its seller record, and the build fails if any ad artifact beyond those two — an ad unit, another network’s tag, a publisher identifier anywhere else — appears in the output.
If advertising is enabled after independent approval, it will be confined to fixed-size below-content slots with no interstitial, overlay, or anchored formats, nothing adjacent to a control or a result, and no behaviour anywhere in the product that depends on an ad being clicked.
Original utility, not scaled content
Pages are generated only from verified state records and carry route-specific caveats. Jurisdiction placeholders, templated pages awaiting data, and rewrites of competitor summaries are not published. 51 jurisdictions (the fifty states and the District of Columbia) appear because every rule on those pages is either verified against its primary source or published as a reasoned unknown.
A separate page must help the reader resolve a state-specific question. When a short topic answer is more useful as part of its state guide, the guide carries that answer and the older address directs readers to it. Being published does not guarantee search indexing.
Corrections
A credible conflict with a primary source pauses the affected figure until the source is rechecked. Corrections state what was wrong, not merely that something improved, and they name the citation involved.
Because each figure maps to a named condition in the source list, a report that names the citation and quotes the language you see is reproducible by anyone. Use the corrections form (every page links to it as “Report a correction”), or write to corrections@estatesettlementcost.com. A report that turns out to be right is fixed, re-verified against the source, and listed on the changelog with the date and what was wrong.
AI and automation
The Estate Settlement Cost Editorial Team uses AI models and automated scripts to find and read primary sources, draft explanations, write and test the calculators, and re-check the published figures. None of that is a substitute for the source: a figure is published only when its quotation appears word for word on the publisher’s own page, with its citation and review date. If the official text no longer supports the figure, it must be corrected or withdrawn. Where a model could not tie a rule to a primary source, the page says the figure is unknown rather than estimating it.
No page has been reviewed by an attorney, and automated checking confirms only that the quoted text is still published, not that a court will apply it to a particular estate.
Accountability and review boundary
Estate Settlement Cost currently publishes no named human author or reviewer. It therefore makes no attorney-review claim and emits no person or reviewed-by statement. The organisation is the publisher, while the source list, source review, methodology, and correction record are the evidence a reader can inspect. A named reviewer will be credited only after that person has actually reviewed the stated material and agreed to the dated scope.
This is a limitation, not a credential. Comparing quoted text with official sources does not turn this general information into legal advice or substitute for a licensed professional reviewing a particular estate.
Legal boundary
This site publishes general information. It is not legal, tax, or financial advice, it does not create an attorney-client relationship, and it cannot account for the facts of a specific estate. Probate law varies by state and by county and changes over time. The court and a licensed attorney in the relevant state are the authorities; this site is a way of reaching them faster.