Editorial policy

This page describes how content on Local Service Calculator is produced, reviewed and corrected. The methodology page covers how the numbers are produced; this one covers everything around them.

What we publish

Cost calculators and the written guidance around them, for home services in the United States. Each page is written for somebody about to get quotes who wants to know whether the number they have been given is reasonable.

How a page is reviewed

Every page moves through three states, and the site enforces them rather than relying on anyone to remember.

1. Draft. Written but not checked. Served with a noindex directive and absent from the sitemap.
2. In review. Being read by an editor. Still withheld from search engines.
3. Reviewed. Checked and cleared. Only now can it be published.

A page cannot be published while any cost figure it depends on lacks a recorded source. That is a technical constraint, not a policy anybody has to follow — the publish action refuses, and says which figure is missing a citation.

Where figures come from

Wages come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Material prices are benchmarked against observed retail prices with the source and date recorded, then carried forward by Producer Price Index movement. Regional adjustment comes from Bureau of Economic Analysis price parities. Geography comes from the HUD USPS crosswalk and the Census Bureau.

A small number of inputs are not published by any federal agency — labor hours per unit of work, material quantities, contractor overhead. These are editorial judgments. They are listed on the methodology page with the reasoning for each, because an assumption that is not stated cannot be argued with.

Keeping it current

Wage and material index data refreshes automatically on a schedule matching how often each source publishes. Benchmark prices are re-checked periodically; the system warns when a benchmark has drifted far enough that the index is doing most of the work.

Corrections

If a figure is wrong we correct it and, where the error was material, say so on the page. We would rather be told than not: hello@localservicecalculator.com, with the page and what you expected to see. A source helps.

Independence

Advertising and paid contractor placement have no influence on the figures. They cannot: the numbers come from federal data and a published method, and changing one to suit an advertiser would require changing the method on a page that shows its working. Paid placement is labeled wherever it appears, as described in the advertising disclosure.