Where the facts come from

The one rule

If a claim does not have a source and a date, it does not get published. Not softened, not hedged, not attributed to “operators say.” It is left out, and where its absence matters, the page says the data was not found.

Source hierarchy

Sources are used in this order, and the order is not negotiable:

1. Government sources. State licensing boards, state departments of insurance, and federal agencies, for anything about what a rule requires. Nothing about a legal requirement is published from a secondary source.
2. Published policy forms and provider documentation. The standard industry coverage forms and each provider's own product pages, for anything about what a policy covers or excludes.
3. Recognized industry reference works, for terminology and for the names the same coverage goes by across providers.

Competitor blogs, content marketing pages and aggregator summaries are read to find where the primary document lives. They are never cited as the source of a fact.

Why every claim carries a date

This is the most important thing on this page. There are two very different kinds of statement, and they age in opposite ways:

• An observationsays what a document said on a given day. “As of July 26, 2026, this agency's published page stated X.” That stays true forever, because it is a fact about a reading, not about the present.
• A standing claimsays what is required right now. “This state requires X.” That can quietly become false without anyone touching the page.

This site writes observations wherever possible, and dates the ones that have to be standing claims. When you read a page here, check the date next to the claim, not just the date at the top.

Numbers

Any figure that appears in the copy comes from a typed data model in the codebase with its own tests, not from a sentence someone wrote. That means a number cannot be edited in one place and left stale in another, and a number without a source URL and a retrieval date cannot enter the model at all.

Where a provider publishes a starting price, it is reported as an advertised starting point with its source and date, and it is never presented as a quote. This site does not estimate premiums.

What is published today

This site is new and its data holdings are deliberately small. Being straight about the current state matters more than looking established:

• Published: licensing requirement research for specific trades, sourced to state licensing agencies and municipal ordinances, and coverage explanations sourced to standard policy forms.
• In progress, not yet published: a provider coverage matrix recording which providers name which coverages for which trades, and a log of the liability limits that public vendor and permit documents actually require.
• Not built: a full state by state requirement index across all trades. It is the intended core of this site and it does not exist yet. It will appear here when it does, and not before.

Review

Pages that carry commercial referral links are held to an additional standard: review by an agent holding a property and casualty license, shown on the page with their name, license number and review date. No such reviewer is in place today, which is exactly why no page on this site carries a referral link yet. See how we make money and the editorial policy.

Errors

Sources get misread and pages go stale. When that happens the fix is made and noted rather than quietly swapped in. The correction process is described on the editorial policy page.