Methodology

How every number is made

The grades

Every dollar and rate on TaxTrace wears one of three grades, and the grade is recomputed every time the page renders — never cached as decoration.

VERIFIED

Read from an official record — an adopted budget, a certified roll, the taxing authority's own published schedule — for the exact tax year shown.

MODELED

Computed from official rates plus your household's inputs, with every modeling assumption declared. Plausible, not a bill — and never dressed up as verified.

NOT CHECKED YET

Research unfinished. We show the gap on purpose: an honest blank beats a confident guess, and nothing renders a number it can't trace.

Two more marks appear where they're true: Confirmed · none means we checked and a levy genuinely doesn't exist — a finding, not a blank. Civic facts (who sits in a seat, when a budget hearing runs) don't wear money grades; they carry a quiet ✓ checked <date> line, and a fact past its verification window degrades automatically.

A total inherits its weakest input: one modeled line caps the whole figure at modeled. A displayed number is never used as a status — applicability and trust are tracked structurally, beside the amount, never inferred from it.

The two routes — and the third, inside the agency

Every tax line has two distinct levers, held by different bodies. The rate — how much is taken — lives in statute or a voter-approved measure; it changes only through the enacting body, and we record which body that is from the same sealed rate-mechanism facts the line pages cite. The spend— what it buys — is set fresh each budget year by whoever adopts that money's budget; we attribute each spending split to the jurisdiction whose adopted budget document it was read from, so a service funded from several budgets decomposes into per-budget shares that reconcile to the total. A letter about a line quotes only the dollars its recipient's body actually controls.

A third lever sits insideeach agency — how a department divides its own budget. Where we haven't sourced an agency's own allocation records, we say so and show nothing invented: no names, no session dates, no inside split. The same honesty rule covers bills and hearings: when we can't name the live instrument behind a "speak" lever, we show the body's known window and say plainly that we don't track its bills yet.

The privacy model

Your address is never stored, never logged, and never appears in a URL — it travels once, in a request body, to resolve which jurisdictions govern it, and the response comes back to this page. Which districts you live in is worked out on this device from data already embedded in the page, so no request ever names your district. Household inputs (income, home value) are session-only; where published rate schedules ship in the build, an income change is computed on this device and never transmitted at all.