How we check

Every page here carries a date. This explains what that date is promising, and just as importantly what it is not.

The date means somebody opened the page that day

A verification date is not the day the article was written, and not the year printed in the title. It is the day the amounts, deadlines and eligibility rules in the body were read off the page that sets them: a state energy office, a utility's rebate page, an IRS notice.

Anything older than its stamp has not been re-checked since. That is the honest position, and in a field where programs close without notice it is more than almost anyone else will tell you.

Read at the source, not from the middle of the chain

A rebate figure in this field travels. The program publishes it, an installer quotes it in a sales page, an aggregator collects the installer, a blog summarizes the aggregator. Four steps later the number is on forty sites and the original changed in March.

So the rule is to find the body that administers the program, read its own page, and cite it. Those sources are tagged OFFICIAL in the list at the foot of every article, so you can see how much of a page rests on primary material rather than on somebody's summary of it.

Open, paused, closed: a status is a claim with an expiry date

Most of what is left after the federal credits ended is first come, first served. A program can stop accepting applications on a Tuesday because the allocation ran out, and the page announcing it may not change for a week.

A page here that says a program is taking applications is therefore making a claim that can become false without anyone touching the article. Those pages carry a machine-readable status, and the publishing system refuses to accept one unless the same program is also entered on a re-check list with a date on it. An unattended "open" is treated as a defect, not a detail.

What the software refuses to publish

Editorial standards that live only in someone's head get skipped on a busy day. These are enforced by the build: if an article breaks them, the site does not compile and there is nothing to upload.

• No article may have an empty source list, and at least two sources must be the administering body's own page.
• No article may be missing a verification date or a summary block.
• A verification date in the future is rejected outright. You cannot have checked something tomorrow.
• A verification date more than a week older than the publication date is rejected. A stamp that sat in a drawer is not a check.
• Publication dates cannot be set ahead, so a run of articles cannot be back-filled to fake a schedule.
• Before publishing, every dollar amount, percentage, deadline and program code in the body is looked for in the cited sources, which are fetched again at that moment rather than trusted from earlier. A figure that cannot be found has to be hedged, labeled, or removed.

Unverified means unverified

Sometimes the administering page is vague, is a PDF that cannot be read, or contradicts another page run by the same agency. When that happens the number is labeled as unverified in the text, and most articles end with a short list of exactly what has not been confirmed.

Copying a figure from another site and presenting it as checked would be the one thing that makes this whole project pointless, so it does not happen. An admitted gap is the cost of the stamp meaning anything.

Corrections

Allocations run out, rules get rewritten mid-year, and a state that was open last month can be closed today. When something here turns out to be wrong or out of date it gets fixed and the verification date is reset to the day of the re-check, so a corrected page cannot hide behind an old stamp.

If you have hit something that does not match reality, especially if you were told no when this site said yes, please write: contact@rebateverified.com. The state, the program and the date help more than anything else.

What this is not

It is not tax advice and not an application service. It reports what programs say about themselves. Whether a credit applies to your return is a question for a tax professional; whether your home qualifies is a question for the program. See About for who runs this and Privacy for what the site does and does not collect.