About & methodology
StateTally exists because the rules that matter most to people — how much alimony a court can order, what an unemployment check will be, what a seasonal visa job actually pays — change completely at the state line, and the official sources are scattered across fifty statutes, agency schedules and federal disclosure files that few people can read end to end.
Who publishes it
StateTally is an independent publication. It is not a law firm, not a government agency and not affiliated with any state; nobody pays to appear here and no calculator recommends a provider. It is edited by its publisher and built by a small factory of scripts that transcribe the source documents, render the pages and re-check the figures on a schedule. Advertising, where shown, is served by third parties and has no influence on any figure or ranking on the site.
Where the numbers come from
- Calculators (alimony, unemployment, child support): the state statute or the agency's published benefit schedule, cited and linked on every page. The formula on the page is a transcription of that document — the percentages, divisors, caps and weeks — not an average or an opinion.
- H-2A and H-2B pages: the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Foreign Labor Certification disclosure files for the fiscal year, and, for open job orders, the DOL's own SeasonalJobs.dol.gov daily data feed. Employer contact details are never republished; each order links to its official listing.
- City pages: the Census Bureau's population estimates and county assignments. These pages state explicitly that the formula is statewide and name the county court that hears the case.
- Guides: written from those same datasets, so a guide never contains a figure that is not also on a data page with a source.
How pages are reviewed
Every calculator shows the date it was last reviewed against its source. Figures that change on a known calendar — benefit minimums and maximums, income caps, wage floors — are on a re-verification schedule keyed to the month each state usually publishes new values; when a date passes, the page is flagged and re-checked before the figure is considered current. The H-2 job-order pages are rebuilt every day from the feed, and show the feed date.
How we use AI
Statutes, schedules and datasets are transcribed from the official sources and verified by a person. The plain-language explanations, worked examples and FAQs that surround them are drafted with the help of AI language models and then edited and checked against the cited source before publication; anything that cannot be traced to the source is removed. Where a state leaves a decision to the judge, the page says so instead of inventing a formula.
Corrections
Corrections are our favorite email. If a figure is stale, a formula is wrong or a source has changed, write to hello@statetally.com: we fix it, note the change on the affected page and update the review date. We read everything, but we cannot answer questions about an individual case.
What this site is not
Nothing here is legal, tax or financial advice, and no calculator can capture judicial discretion, agency eligibility decisions or the facts of your situation. Use the estimates to prepare for a conversation with a licensed professional, the relevant state agency or an employer — not to replace one. Full terms are in the terms of use; what we collect (very little) is in the privacy policy.
A longer account of the process: How StateTally verifies every figure.