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 current verification snapshot contains 254 primary-source records and 952 named machine checks. 952 of those checks matched in the snapshot generated on September 15, 2026; thepublic verification report andsource ledger expose the records, URLs, quotations, hashes, and review dates behind those counts.
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.
This is enforced rather than promised: a live verification run re-fetches each source and writes the captured primary text to the ledger; every release build then checks all 254 quotations against that authenticated text, and a mismatch fails the build. The standard was adopted after an audit found that every quotation in the initial pilot was a paraphrase; that correction is recorded on thechangelog.
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 ledger records the source URL, publisher version or effective-date signal when the publisher provides one, the response hash, and the date checked. 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 probed before release. A link that stops resolving fails the build. 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. 50 states appear because every rule on those pages is either verified against its primary source or published as a reasoned unknown.
The per-state detail routes were withheld from the search index during the launch pilot. That constraint was lifted on 2026-08-08: each now carries unique, sourced statutory content well past the thin-page floor the build enforces, so all of them are indexed.
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 ledger, a report that names the citation and quotes the language you see is reproducible by anyone. Send it to corrections@estatesettlementcost.com.
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 ledger, verification report, 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. The current snapshot is machine-verified, but machine verification 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.