Publication threshold
A state page requires verified primary sources for all three of a simplified procedure, a court-cost rule, and an executor compensation rule. A state with two of the three is not published, because a partial record invites a reader to assume the missing part 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.
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: all 28 quotations are checked against the captured primary text on every build, 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 the changelog.
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.
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. Advertising is off, and the build fails if any ad script, publisher identifier, or non-empty ads.txt 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. 9 states appear because 9 states have complete verified records.
Detailed subroutes remain out of the search index during the pilot so that the indexed surface stays narrower than the verified data.
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.
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.