Methodology
How we verify our state law data
The standard we hold a published figure to, and an honest count of how many of ours currently meet it.
Our state law pages publish bond amounts, net worth minimums and license requirements that people size real decisions against. Some of those entries a member of our team has read directly off the regulator's own page and signed their name to. Most are compiled from published state requirements and have not been independently confirmed by a person.
Both kinds are on this site, and you should be able to tell them apart. So each entry says which it is, and the counts below say how many of each we currently have.
Where we stand today
Counted live from our published state law entries each time this page loads.
- Published entries
- 452
- Confirmed by a person
- 157
- 34.7% of published entries
- Not independently verified
- 295
- Compiled from published state requirements
What counts as verified
We only put a "Last verified" date on an entry when all three of these are true. A date on its own is not a verification, and we do not publish one.
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A named person did the check
A member of our team, recorded by name in our system, not an automated script and not a content-change timestamp.
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They read the regulator's own page
The exact URL they opened is recorded with the verification. It has to be the state agency or the statute itself. We never accept one of our own pages as the source for our own figure.
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The date is the date they did it
Not the date the page was edited, and not the date a script noticed the text had changed.
Each verification is recorded as its own permanent entry, including the figures as they stood at the time. We keep the earlier ones, so a figure that changed after somebody signed off on it is visible to us rather than quietly inheriting the old approval.
How often we re-check
A verified entry is re-checked against the regulator every 12 months. Once an entry passes that mark it goes back into our review queue, and the queue is ordered by how much each page is actually read, so the pages people rely on most are re-checked first.
We also run an automated check that tries to resolve every statute we cite against a primary source. That check can tell us a citation points at the wrong section or no longer resolves, which puts the entry in front of a person. It is a way of finding problems, not a substitute for the human check, and it never puts a verified date on a page.
What an unverified entry means
It does not mean the figure is wrong. Entries we have not independently confirmed are compiled from states' published requirements and are generally accurate. It means only that nobody on our team has personally opened the regulator's page and confirmed that specific number, so we will not claim they have.
Those entries carry a line saying so, along with the source we compiled them from, so you can check it yourself. Before you commit capital or file anything, confirm the current requirement with the state agency directly, whichever kind of entry you are reading.
Found something that looks wrong? Tell us and we will check it against the regulator and record what we find.