People ask us 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? Here's the honest answer, because "trust us" isn't one.
Every number on the site falls into one of three buckets, and we'd rather tell you which than pretend everything is magically real-time.
Live — refreshed from the source every month
Most of what shapes a move is published by the government on a regular cadence, so we pull it straight from the source and refresh it on a schedule. 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. Health coverage, commute times, incomes, and the population's makeup from the Census.
These don't change daily — they change monthly to yearly — so a monthly refresh keeps them current without pretending a number moved when it didn't.
Curated — real facts with no clean feed
Some things are genuinely factual but have no machine-readable source: statutory tax rates, abortion and gun and LGBTQ law, which states expanded Medicaid. Legislatures and courts set these; nobody publishes them as a tidy API. So we maintain them by hand, against primary sources, and — this is the important part — we stamp them with the date we last verified them, right on the card. A curated fact that hides its age is a trap. One that shows it is just honest.
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 baseline estimates they are and don't dress them up as a live feed.
What we will never do
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 labeled as one — or nothing at all. That rule has cost us features. We think it's the whole point.