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.

The same rules apply to our free tools, the Section 8 income limit pages and the lessons in our free courses. Their numbers come from the agencies that set them: HUD's published income limits and Fair Market Rents, USDA's SNAP benefit amounts and rules, and the federal poverty guidelines and state Medicaid limits. Each tool page ends with a Where the numbers come from section that links to those pages, and the income limit pages say which HUD year they use and when it took effect.

The tools give estimates, not decisions. They follow the official formulas, but states and housing agencies can apply the rules differently, so each page says plainly that only your own agency can decide whether you qualify.

When a figure changes, such as a new HUD year or the October SNAP adjustment, we update the tool or page that uses it. Lessons are written from the same official sources as our guides and checked the same way before they go live.

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 form. 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.