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TaxCompare

Editorial Policy

Last updated: June 2026

This page explains who is behind TaxCompare, how our pages are produced, and the standards every page on taxcompare.org is held to. We publish it so readers, journalists, and search engines can judge our work by a clear, stated process rather than guesswork.

Who runs TaxCompare

TaxCompare is an independent publication built and maintained by the TaxCompare Team. We are not funded, owned, or directed by any of the agencies, companies, or organizations that appear in our data. We do not accept paid placements, sponsored rankings, or fees to add, alter, or remove an entry. Our editorial judgment is not for sale.

How our content is produced

TaxCompare covers U.S. federal and state income taxes. Our pages are assembled programmatically from IRS Revenue Procedures and the Tax Foundation state-tax database: we fetch the primary records, process them with documented, repeatable methods, and render them as pages a non-specialist can read. We encode federal brackets, standard deductions, and common credits from IRS Revenue Procedures and pair them with state bracket tables from the Tax Foundation. The calculator applies both to a user-entered scenario (income, filing status, dependents, state) and surfaces federal plus state liability side by side.

We are transparent that this is a data-publishing operation, not a wire service of on-the-ground reporters. Where we add narrative, that narrative describes and interprets the underlying public data — it never invents facts the data does not contain. Automated assembly is reviewed against the source, and the methodology behind any score or ranking is documented and linkable.

Editorial standards

  • Primary source only. Every figure traces back to IRS Revenue Procedures and the Tax Foundation state-tax database, cited and linkable on the page where it appears.
  • No invented numbers. If a value is not in the underlying public data, it does not appear on taxcompare.org. We never generate synthetic statistics to fill gaps.
  • Documented methodology. Rankings, grades, and composite scores are editorial calculations derived from public data using stated, repeatable formulas — not certifications or endorsements.
  • Dated and refreshed. Refreshed once per year after the IRS publishes the next tax year’s Revenue Procedures (typically late October or November).
  • Corrections welcome. When a reader or the source identifies an error, we fix it — see our Corrections Policy.

Verification and fact-checking

Because our numbers come straight from IRS Revenue Procedures and the Tax Foundation state-tax database, our verification work is about faithful processing rather than re-reporting. The detail of how we check figures before publication is described in our Fact-Checking Policy.

Ownership and funding transparency

TaxCompare is part of a small portfolio of independent public-data sites. The site is free to read and carries no display advertising. We do not sell personal data. Where an outbound link is an affiliate link, it is disclosed and never changes our editorial judgment.

Contact

Questions about how a page was produced, or about these standards? hello@taxcompare.org. See also our About page and our Corrections Policy.