Editorial standards

Every guide is built from the agencies that run the program: HUD and local public housing agencies, USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, the Social Security Administration, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the IRS, state benefit agencies and the Federal Register. Dollar amounts, income limits, deadlines and eligibility rules come from those sources, and each guide lists the pages it relied on in a Sources section at the end.

When official sources disagree, or a rule varies by state or housing agency, we say so and tell you who to ask, rather than guessing.

We use AI writing tools to help research and draft guides from those official sources. AI never publishes anything on its own. A person on our editorial team reviews every guide before it goes live: checking each figure and rule against the source, rewriting where something is unclear, and cutting anything that can't be confirmed.

While a draft is being checked, any fact we haven't confirmed yet is marked in it, and our publishing system won't publish a guide until every one of those marks is resolved. Guides also go through automated checks before publishing for reading level, sourcing and duplicated text.

Benefits rules are written in legal language. Our job is to turn them into plain steps: who qualifies, what you'll get, how to apply and what to do if something goes wrong. We aim for writing a middle-school reader can follow, define terms the first time we use them, and link to the official application instead of asking for your information.

Benefit amounts, income limits and rules change, often once a year. We watch the Federal Register and agency announcements for changes, and update the guides they affect. Every guide shows the date it was last reviewed.

Some pages cover programs that have ended, such as the 2021 stimulus payments. We keep them as dated history pages and label them clearly, so no one mistakes them for help that is still available.

If you spot something wrong or out of date, please tell us through our contact page or at hello@kpcbedge.com. We check every report against the official source and, when we fix a guide, update its review date.

KPCB Edge is a private, independent publisher. We are not part of, endorsed by or paid by any government agency, we never take applications, and we never charge for help with benefits. If anyone asks you to pay to apply for a government program, that's a warning sign.

The site is supported by advertising. Ads are labelled “Advertisement” and kept separate from our guides, and advertisers have no say in what we write or which programs we cover.