Why this page exists
A site that publishes specific dollar amounts will get some of them wrong. Terms change, fee schedules move behind logins, and a figure that was correct in May can be stale by September. What matters is what happens next.
Our answer is that corrections are made against a primary source, dated, and recorded in public. That includes the cases where we had to withdraw a number.
How we handle a reported error
- Received. Reports go to [email protected]; see Contact for what to include.
- Checked against the primary source. Not against the report, and not against whichever of our own pages sounds more plausible. We go back to the biller's terms of service, fee schedule, payment policy page, or the regulatory filing, and read what it says today.
- Corrected, or withdrawn. If the source confirms a different figure, the page and the underlying data file are both updated and the source link and verification date are refreshed. If the source cannot be reached or does not publish the figure at all, the figure comes off the site rather than staying up uncited.
- Recorded. Substantive corrections are written up in the verification log with the date, the old figure, the new figure, and the source that settled it.
A correction that changes a published number is never made silently. If it was wrong enough to matter, it is worth saying so.
Correcting one page is not enough
Most figures on this site exist in two places: the biller's page and billers.json, the data file behind the stats tables. For a period the two disagreed on the late fee for eight billers, because each had been verified separately against a different document. The site was publishing two answers to the same question at once.
Both are now corrected together, and an automated check runs before every build. The check fails the build, and the site does not publish, if a page and the data file state different late fees, if a data row points at a page that does not exist, or if a figure is missing its source URL, source title, or verification date.
What last_verified means
Each figure carries the date a person last opened the cited source and confirmed the figure was still there.
It does not mean the figure changed on that date, and it does not mean the figure is still correct today. It means that on that date, that source said that. If the date is old, treat the figure as provisional and check with your biller. If the date is recent and the figure is still wrong, tell us. That is exactly the report we want.
Re-verification cadence
- Quarterly review of every published figure. Anything carrying a verification date older than the current quarter is queued for re-checking.
- Out-of-cycle re-verification whenever a reader reports a change, a source link dies, a biller announces a pricing or terms change, or two parts of the site disagree.
- Priority order. The most-read pages and the largest-dollar figures are re-checked first. A stale streaming late fee matters less than a stale utility shutoff timeline.
We publish the verification date on every page so you do not have to take the cadence on trust. You can see for yourself how old any number is.
"No late fee" is not the same as "amount not published"
These look similar in a table and mean opposite things. We distinguish them:
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| None | Verified: this biller charges no late fee. Typically prepaid services and some subscriptions, where the service just stops. |
| (amount not published) | A late fee does apply. The biller confirms it but does not publish the amount publicly, or it varies by state tariff, or the fee schedule is not reachable without an account. |
| A dollar figure | Verified against the cited source on the date shown. |
Conflating these is not a cosmetic problem. Treating an unknown fee as a zero once put credit cards, rent, and utilities, which unambiguously charge late fees, at the cheap end of our own rankings. Unknown amounts are now excluded from rankings rather than counted as zero.
Withdrawn figures are published, not deleted
When we cannot verify a figure, we take it off the page. Then we say so in public, with the reason. The verification log records every withdrawal: which biller, which figure, what we had published before, and why the source no longer supports it. Recent examples include a biller mid-merger whose fee pages now redirect to the acquirer's site, and several whose fee schedules are no longer publicly reachable.
The log also records the corrections we made to our own previously published numbers, including one where both of our conflicting figures turned out to be wrong.
A site that quietly deletes its mistakes looks more accurate than one that lists them. It is not. We would rather you be able to check our record than take our word for it.
Known gaps
The verification log carries an outstanding-issues section listing what we know is not yet right. That includes data rows still to be backfilled, timelines not yet reconciled, and hub tables not yet sourced to the standard we set for per-biller pages. We would rather publish that list than let you discover it one page at a time.
Found something wrong? Tell us with the page URL, the figure, and a link to the official source. Nothing on this site is legal or financial advice; see our Disclaimer.