Editorial policy: how our cost ranges are made
This site earns its keep by being honest about numbers it can't personally verify. This page states, plainly, where our figures come from, what they are not, how often they're revisited, and what happens when one is wrong.
1. How cost ranges are compiled
- Wide national bands, not quotes. Every figure on this site is an approximate national range, rounded deliberately wide. We compile from commonly published national averages, per-unit pricing that contractors broadly publish, and what homeowners commonly report paying. We then sanity-check the band against the underlying arithmetic (materials at published unit prices, typical labor shares, permit fee orders of magnitude).
- No fabricated precision. We do not cite a single study, survey, or dataset as if it were gospel, we never publish a single dollar figure as “the cost” of anything, and we do not invent named sources. Where an industry mechanism drives price (per-ton asphalt, per-gallon septic hauling, per-square roofing), we show the mechanism so you can check the math yourself.
- Hedged where reality is hedged. Claims about energy savings, insurance coverage, rebates, tax treatment, and code specifics are written with the uncertainty that actually exists in 2026, with explicit “verify locally” instructions rather than confident-sounding guesses.
- The single source of truth rule. Our estimator and guide tables are maintained together so a number never differs between the two places it appears.
2. Update cadence
Cost ranges get a full review at least annually, and material-price or labor-market shocks (lumber, asphalt mix, copper) trigger off-cycle edits on the affected pages. Every guide carries a “Last updated” date, and the sitemap reflects the same date. If you see a page whose date is more than a year old, treat its numbers as historical, not current.
3. Independence: no paid placements in rankings or tables
- No pay-for-placement, ever. No contractor, brand, film supplier, or affiliate network can buy a position in any table, comparison, checklist, or ranking on this site. Product tiers are ranked by widely understood performance characteristics, not by commercial relationships.
- Which projects we cover is a research decision. Pages are chosen from measured public search demand and how thin the existing information is — not from who pays us.
- Ads and lead-gen, stated plainly. The advertising slots on this site are currently inert placeholders, and every “find local pros” module is visibly disabled because no partnership is active. If we activate AdSense or affiliate quote-matching in future, affiliate links will be disclosed where they appear, and revenue will not influence which options a guide recommends.
4. Corrections
If a number, code reference, or legal/insurance statement on this site looks wrong to you — and you're a contractor who sees these prices weekly, so you're the person most likely to catch us — email corrections@whatitcoststoday.com or use the contact page with “correction” in the subject. Every credible report is reviewed; verified fixes are edited into the page, the page's last-updated date moves, and material corrections are summarized in the about page changelog note. We would rather publicly correct a number than quietly defend it.
5. What this site is not
We are not a contractor, we do not inspect your home, and nothing here is a quote, a bid, or professional advice for your specific property. The intended use of every page is the same: walk into three local quotes knowing what the honest range looks like, and make the contractors explain any number outside it. Always get 3 local quotes.