Methodology

Every guide on this site is generated from one dataset: a per-state, per-program record covering the agency, its official pages, application routes, procedures for movers, and the eligibility numbers that decide whether benefits survive a move. This page explains how that dataset is built and maintained.

Sources: official only

We cite state agencies (.gov and official program domains) and the federal program offices: Medicaid.gov (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services); USDA Food and Nutrition Service; USDA Food and Nutrition Service — WIC; U.S. Department of Labor — Unemployment Insurance; HHS Office of Family Assistance — TANF. We never cite aggregators, benefits-help sites, or blogs — where we used one to find a lead, we still verified and cited the official page. Every page lists its sources with the date we accessed them.

The verification rules

• Every state row carries a last-verified date, shown on the page.
• A number an agency does not publish is shown as unpublished — never estimated. An honest gap beats a plausible guess.
• The build system refuses to publish unless all 51 jurisdictions are present for every program, every row has at least one official source, and every row has a verification date. A page cannot exist without its data passing that gate.
• Where state sites blocked automated checks, we corroborated through the federal directories (USDA FNS, US DOL, Medicaid.gov) and flagged the row for manual re-check.

Statistics and reuse

Every figure on our statistics page is computed from this dataset at build time — nothing there is typed by hand, and a build gate re-derives each number independently and refuses to publish if the two calculations disagree. States that do not publish a value are excluded from the aggregate and the real denominator is stated in the sentence. Those statistics are licensedCC BY 4.0: republish them freely, with a link back to the page as attribution.

Update cadence

Income limits refresh annually each October, after the federal poverty guideline updates flow into program limits. Procedures and agency links are re-checked semi-annually, and any reader-reported error is verified and fixed ahead of the schedule.

What this site will not do

No individual advice, no applications, no lead generation, no ads shaped like buttons. This is an independent guide — not affiliated with any government agency — and each page's job is to hand you the right official link with the right context.