Editorial policy

These are commitments, not aspirations. Most of them are enforced by the build rather than by good intentions — a page that breaks one of the first three cannot be generated at all.

1 · Sourcing

• Official publications only. Figures come from the Social Security Administration, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Federal Register. Never from a summary, an aggregator or a search-result snippet.
• Every dataset carries its source, its URL and its retrieval date, and those appear on every page that uses it. The full list.
• Where a source cannot be read, nothing is published. A gap is stated as a gap. This is why some Medicare years have no bracket table here — a hand-keyed table from a secondary source would look identical to a sourced one and be worth nothing.
• Raw retrievals are archived alongside the data, so every published number traces to a file rather than to a memory of a page.

2 · Accuracy

• All 51 historical adjustments are recomputed from the raw index on every build and matched against SSA’s published table. If one disagrees, no page generates.
• Every Medicare income-related tier is reconstructed from the statutory multipliers, every Part D amount is reproduced exactly from the base premium, and the current-year parameters are reconciled against two independent official sources.
• Derived numbers beat asserted numbers. Where a computation and a piece of prose disagree, the computation wins and the prose changes. Two figures on this site are published against what a widely repeated summary says, for exactly that reason. Both are documented.
• Rounding happens only at documented steps and never twice. The list of steps.

3 · Projections

• A figure that has not been announced can only reach a page through a component that requires the assumption behind it as a string. There is no code path that emits an unlabelled projection, including one written by hand into prose.
• The projected number never appears without its if. Titles and descriptions carry the hedge, because a search result is where a misleading impression would actually form.
• No third-party forecast is ever cited or reproduced. Scenarios are derived from published index values plus one stated assumption, and all of them are shown rather than a single preferred one.
• The following year’s Medicare premium is never estimated. It is announced about a month after the adjustment, and until then no honest net figure exists.

4 · Scope — what this site will not cover

This is a permanent boundary rather than a backlog. The following are out of scope and will stay out of scope:

The line is between what the published rules produce for a number you give us and what you should do. This site does the first and never the second.

5 · Your data

The privacy policy covers analytics, advertising and cookies.

6 · Corrections

• A revised figure is added as a new dated record rather than overwriting an old one, and the affected pages are rebuilt.
• Every change to a number is logged publicly with the date and the reasoning. Typographical and wording changes are not logged; numbers always are.
• Reports go to support@inventum.com.au and are checked against the primary publication rather than against another summary.

The correction log. Because this site publishes under a brand rather than a personal byline, that log is the accountability record.

7 · Advertising

• The site is funded by display advertising. There are no affiliate links, no lead generation, no sponsored placements and no paid inclusion of any figure or link.
• No advertiser sees or influences any figure. No advertiser receives anything typed into a calculator, because nothing typed into a calculator leaves the browser.
• Advertising never appears between a calculator input and its result, and every slot reserves its height in advance so the page does not move under the reader.
• No interstitials, and no sticky units that obstruct reading on a small screen.

8 · Independence and identity

COLA Ledger is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Social Security Administration, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, CMS or any U.S. government agency.

No agency emblem, seal or government styling is used anywhere on this site, and the build fails if such an asset appears in the repository. Nothing here is an official publication.

9 · Review

Rate pages are re-verified against the live government tables each January, when the annual parameters change; Medicare pages each November, when the premium notice publishes; and the adjustment pages each October, when the new determination lands. The verification date shown on each page is the date its figures were last checked against source, not the date the file was edited.

This policy last reviewed 10 August 2026.

Related

• Methodologygates and rounding
• Sourcesevery dataset
• Correctionsthe dated log
• Privacyanalytics and ads
• Aboutwho publishes this
• Termsuse of the site