People ask a fair question: when piomover says Texas has a violent crime rate of 410 per 100,000, or that New Jersey's effective property tax is 1.9%, how do we know that's still true? "Trust us" isn't an answer, so here's the real one.
Every number on the site falls into one of three buckets. We'd rather tell you which than pretend the whole thing is magically real-time.
Live: refreshed from the source every month
Most of what shapes a move is published by the government on a schedule, so we pull it straight from the source and refresh on that cadence. Unemployment from the BLS. Crime from the FBI. Cost of living and rents from the BEA. Home values from Zillow. Air quality from the EPA. Schools from the Department of Education. Coverage, commutes, incomes, and demographics from the Census.
These don't move daily (they move monthly to yearly), so a monthly refresh keeps them honest without pretending a figure changed when it didn't. You can watch the freshness of every category, live, on the data status page.
Curated: real facts with no clean feed
Some things are genuinely factual but have no machine-readable source: statutory tax rates, abortion and firearm and LGBTQ law, which states expanded Medicaid. Legislatures and courts set these; nobody ships them as a tidy API. So we maintain them by hand against primary sources, and, the important part, we stamp each one with the date we last verified it, right on the card. A curated fact that hides its age is a trap; one that shows it is just being honest. (Here's how we do the same thing with the law itself.)
Fixed: things that don't move
A state's average summer high is a 30-year climate normal. Its capital is its capital. Coordinates are coordinates. We label these as the baselines they are and don't dress them up as a live feed.
The one rule under all of it
We won't invent a number to fill a blank. If we don't have a measured value, you'll see an honest estimate clearly marked as one, or nothing at all. That rule has cost us features we'd have liked to ship, and we'd make the same call again. See it for yourself on any comparison.