1. Agreement
This user agreement is a contract between you and the operator of CostAnswer for use of the website, the calculators, the stored datasets, and any application programming interfaces published on the same origin. It applies each time you load a page, run a calculation, follow a link, or call an endpoint on the site. The privacy policy is part of this agreement. If the two conflict on how inputs are handled, the privacy policy controls that subject.
By using the site you represent that you have read this agreement and the privacy policy, that you have the legal capacity to enter the contract, and that you will not use a result as if it were advice, a filing, a quote, or an official determination.
We may change these terms. The version on this page, with the effective date above, is the one that applies. Continued use after a change is acceptance of the new terms. If you do not accept a change, stop using the site.
2. The service
CostAnswer publishes free U.S. calculators. A page collects the numbers you type, runs a tested formula in your browser, and shows the arithmetic. When a figure did not come from you, it comes from a dated copy of a U.S. public dataset stored on this site. The formula version and, when data was used, the dataset snapshot id are printed under Technical details.
The service includes topic hubs, search, methodology pages, data-source pages, this legal set, and any lookup endpoints that support a calculator (for example mapping a ZIP code to a GSA locality). It does not include accounts, saved scenarios, live broker quotes, prepared tax returns, clinical assessments, travel authorization, or the ability to file anything with a government agency.
We may add, change, or remove a calculator, a dataset, an endpoint, or a page at any time. We may pause the site for maintenance. We do not promise uninterrupted access, a particular catalogue, or that a calculator that exists today will exist tomorrow.
3. Who it is for
The calculators are written for people in the United States. A state, ZIP code, county, or federal fiscal year on a page is that place or calendar. It is not a substitute for another country, a U.S. territory GSA does not cover, a foreign per diem, or a local rule the snapshot does not contain.
You must be able to form a contract under the law that applies to you. If you use the site for an employer, a client, or an agency, you still accept these terms personally, and you confirm you have authority to bind that organization to them.
Using CostAnswer for work does not make the operator your contractor, your tax preparer, your lender, or your travel office. The person or office that has to sign the loan, the return, the voucher, or the bid remains responsible for that document.
4. Children
The site is not directed at children under 13, and they may not use it. If you are 13 or older and under 18, you may use the calculators only with a parent or guardian who accepts this agreement on your behalf.
Health calculators (BMI, BMR, TDEE, calorie, body fat) use adult formulas. They are not for children even when a parent is supervising. School-grade and GPA pages are arithmetic on the marks you type; they are not a school record.
5. No professional advice
CostAnswer does not give legal, tax, accounting, insurance, investment, medical, nutritional, or travel-authorization advice. Nothing on the site is an offer to lend, a quote from a lender, a securities recommendation, an appraisal, a diagnosis, or a professional-client relationship. Displaying a government rate or a tax table does not make the operator a government agency or a tax preparer.
Money and housing. A mortgage, refinance, loan, interest, or affordability result is an illustration from the inputs and, where used, a national average rate. It is not pre-approval, underwriting, or the payment you will be offered. Closing costs, points, discount, mortgage insurance, escrow, and lender fees vary. A page that starts from principal and interest is not a PITI quote unless it says it has included tax and insurance, and even then those lines are estimates.
Tax and pay. Salary-after-tax, paycheck, and bonus figures estimate federal income tax, FICA, and state wage tax only where this site has a verified schedule for that year. They omit many credits, deductions, local taxes, and payroll-specific rules. They are not Form 1040, a W-2, a W-4 election, or a filing. Supplemental-wage withholding on a bonus is not the tax you will owe on that bonus for the year.
Health. BMI, BMR, TDEE, calorie, and body-fat pages use published adult formulas with the limits shown on each page. They are not a diagnosis, a treatment plan, or medical care. They are not for children. They do not replace a clinician.
Travel. GSA per diem figures are federal ceilings for continental U.S. travel. They are not authorization to travel, a hotel reservation, or your employer’s policy. Lodging tax is reimbursed separately under GSA rules and is not inside the cap. A ZIP lookup that lands on the standard CONUS rate, or that offers a county rate and a city carve-out, is a map of GSA’s tables, not a determination that a particular hotel night is reimbursable.
Construction and energy. Concrete, square footage, electricity, and fuel pages separate measured quantities from waste, fixed utility charges, and local prices. A bag count or a bill estimate is a planning number, not a bid, not a permit, and not your utility tariff.
If you need a decision that has to hold up at a bank, an agency, a clinic, a court, or an employer, use the official source named on the page or a person licensed to give that advice.
6. How results are produced
The form, the formula, and the data are separate. Calculators do not fetch live data while you type. A stored snapshot is hashed. The site will not build if that file no longer matches the hash it was reviewed under. Same inputs and the same Method version should produce the same answer.
Lookup endpoints that support a calculator (ZIP to county, place search) return a stored mapping. They are not a live query of Census, GSA, or any other agency at the moment you type. If the mapping file is older than a later agency release, the page still reports the snapshot it used.
Models leave things out on purpose. Where they do, the page says so next to the answer: depreciation, healthcare, withholding tables, lodging tax, local fees, waste factors, and similar gaps. Those omissions are part of the result. Filling them in from memory does not make the number official.
You can type a number wrong. A snapshot can lag the provider. Official series get revised after this site stored a copy. When a release is overdue, the page says so. None of that is hidden, and none of it is a promise that the figure is complete, current, or right for your case.
7. Government and third-party data
Datasets on this site come from U.S. public sources, including Freddie Mac, the Energy Information Administration, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the IRS, the Social Security Administration, HUD, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, USDA, and the General Services Administration. Each copy is listed on the data sources page with its period and publication date. How those copies are chosen and checked is described on the methodology page.
Those agencies are not authors of CostAnswer, do not endorse the calculators, and are not responsible for how a stored copy is used here. Their terms, revision policies, and later releases control the underlying series. If a source revises a figure, this site updates when a new snapshot is ingested and verified. Until then, the printed snapshot id is the copy that produced your result.
Public-domain status of an underlying table does not give you a license to copy CostAnswer’s engines, page copy, arrangement of the catalogue, or the particular snapshot files as packaged on this site.
8. Other websites
Calculator pages and data pages link to the official publication we stored a copy of. Those sites have their own terms, privacy practices, and revision calendars. We do not control them, and a link is not an endorsement of anything else on that domain.
If an official URL moves or a PDF is replaced, the snapshot id on CostAnswer still names the copy that produced a past result. The live agency page may already show a later number.
9. Your inputs and privacy
What you type stays in your browser. Pay, balances, dates, ZIP codes, quantities, and similar inputs are not sent to CostAnswer to store, profile, or sell. Lookup requests that a calculator has to make (a ZIP code to resolve a locality, a place name to find a geography) send only what that endpoint needs to return a mapping. They are not used to build a profile. How visits are counted, and whether advertising is on, is stated from the live configuration on the privacy page.
Do not paste secrets into a calculator: account numbers, Social Security numbers, medical record identifiers, passwords, or tax-return attachments. The pages do not need them. If you send a correction, follow the contact page and do not attach those documents.
Browser storage on your device (if a page uses it for a session) is under your control. Clearing the browser clears it. It is not an account.
10. License to use the site
We grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to load the public pages and run the calculators for your own questions, including questions you work through for an employer or a client. You may link to any public URL. You may quote a short passage with a link back to the page you quoted.
The license is for human use of the published pages. It is not a dump of the dataset, not an API subscription, and not permission to operate a competing copy of the service from our files, our snapshots, or our HTML. Automated access is allowed only to the extent a well-behaved crawler fetching public pages for search or archiving would be, and only if it does not degrade the service.
11. Intellectual property
The CostAnswer name, the layout of the catalogue, the calculator copy, the engines, the tests, and the particular packaged snapshots on this origin remain ours or remain subject to the rights of the original data providers. U.S. government works in the public domain stay in the public domain. Packaging them with a Method version, a hash, and a page that runs a formula does not put the underlying table under our copyright, and it does not put our software in the public domain.
You do not acquire any ownership by using a calculator, taking a screenshot, or quoting a short passage. Trademarks of Freddie Mac, GSA, IRS, and other sources remain theirs. We use the names of those sources to identify the series we stored, which is the ordinary way to cite a public table.
12. Prohibited use
You may not:
- Copy the calculators, the catalogue, or the packaged snapshots and present them as your own product.
- Frame, scrape, or wrap the pages so they appear to belong to another site.
- Send automated traffic that degrades the service for other readers, including bulk harvesting of every route or every ZIP lookup.
- Probe, overload, or attempt to break the pages, ingestion, hashes, or stored snapshots.
- Remove Method versions, snapshot ids, source citations, or these terms from material you quote.
- Use the site to mislead someone about a loan, a tax filing, a medical fact, or a government rate.
- Resell access to the calculators or charge a third party as if CostAnswer were your hosted product.
- Use the site where U.S. law or the law that applies to you forbids it.
We may rate-limit, block, or refuse access that harms the service or other readers, with or without notice. That does not waive any other remedy.
13. Corrections and feedback
If a figure looks wrong, use the contact page. A report we can check includes the page URL, the Method version, the Data snapshot id, what you typed, what the page showed, and the official table you expected. The same form takes a calculator request, a complaint about the product, or a suggestion. Do not send paystubs, tax returns, account numbers, or medical records.
If you send a correction, a calculator request, a complaint, a suggestion, or other feedback, you grant the operator a worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocable license to use it to operate and improve the site. You confirm it is yours to send and that it does not include confidential information. Sending feedback does not create a duty to reply, to build a calculator, or to keep a particular Method version.
14. Advertising
Some layouts reserve a slot for advertising. No ad network, tag, or tracker loads unless the privacy page says advertising is on. That flag cannot be turned on in software without a public contact address and a dated privacy policy. If ads are later enabled, they are subject to this agreement and to the notice shown at the time. Sponsored placements, if any, will be labelled. Government datasets on the data pages are not paid placements.
Some calculator result pages may show partner or affiliate offers when that flag is on and a real program URL is configured. Those offers are advertising. They are not CostAnswer’s answer, not a lender decision, and not financial, tax, or legal advice. Example partner names in configuration are placeholders until a contract and URL exist. A disclosure sits on the slot.
14a. Professional referrals
Some home-project pages may offer to pass your request to a partner who works with local service professionals. Using that is entirely your choice, and nothing on this site requires it. Before you agree we name the partner who will receive your request, and we ask only for what that partner needs.
CostAnswer is paid a referral fee when a request is passed on. That fee does not change what you pay and does not affect any calculation, range, source, or estimate on this site.
CostAnswer is not a contractor, a broker, or an agent for any contractor. We do not inspect, license-check, vet, endorse, or supervise any professional, and we do not say that we do. Any agreement you reach is between you and that professional. Their price, their work, their licensing, their insurance, and their conduct are theirs, not ours.
An estimate produced by a CostAnswer calculator is our own modelled figure. It is not a quote, not an offer, and not a promise about what anyone will charge. A professional may price the same job differently for good reasons, and a difference between the two is not evidence of anything by itself.
Requesting estimates does not commit you to hiring anyone. How your details are handled, how long they are kept, and how to have them removed are set out in the privacy policy, and how CostAnswer is compensated is set out on the disclosure page.
Third-party ads, if enabled, are not CostAnswer content. Their terms and privacy notices apply to the network that serves them. We do not warrant those ads.
15. Availability
The site is provided when it is up. There is no service-level agreement, no promised uptime, and no promised response time for a correction. Lookup endpoints may be rate-limited. A calculator may be withdrawn if the underlying snapshot cannot be verified.
We are not liable for a period when the site is down, slow, or missing a page you used last week. If you need a number for a filing deadline, a closing, or a voucher, obtain it from the official source or from a person who can stand behind it. CostAnswer is not that person.
16. No warranty
The site, the calculators, the lookup endpoints, and the stored datasets are provided as they are and as available. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement.
We do not warrant that a result is accurate, complete, current, or suitable for a loan, a filing, a diagnosis, a bid, a trip, a reimbursement, or any other decision. We do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted, secure, or free of defects. You use it at your own risk.
17. Limitation of liability
You are responsible for what you do with a number from this site. To the fullest extent the law allows, CostAnswer and the people who operate it are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive loss, or for lost profits, lost data, or lost opportunity, arising from the site, from being unable to use it, from relying on a figure, or from a dataset that had not been updated yet.
That includes a loan you took or did not take, a tax position, a purchase, a medical choice, a construction quantity, an energy bill, and a travel claim. Direct damages, if a court finds any cannot be excluded, are limited to fifty U.S. dollars in aggregate, or the smallest amount the law allows if that cap is not permitted.
Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limits. In those places, the limit applies only as far as that law requires. The rest of this agreement still stands.
18. Indemnity
If you use the site in a way that breaks these terms, or you present a CostAnswer result as advice, as a filing, as a quote, or as someone else’s work, you will defend and indemnify the operator against claims, damages, and reasonable legal costs that come from that use, to the extent the law allows.
19. Changes and termination
We may change a calculator, a dataset, these terms, or the privacy policy. An older Method version keeps that version; a new engine gets a new string. An older snapshot id still names the copy that produced a past result.
We may stop offering the site. Your license ends if you break these terms or if we withdraw the service. Sections that by their nature should survive (no advice, intellectual property, no warranty, liability, indemnity, governing law) survive.
20. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the United States and, where a state law must be chosen, the state in which the operator maintains the service, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Courts there have exclusive jurisdiction, except that we may seek injunctive relief in any court to stop scraping, framing, or other misuse of the site.
If a court strikes one clause, the rest of the agreement remains in force. A failure to enforce a clause once is not a waiver of it. This is the entire agreement for use of the site. It replaces prior terms for that use. A printed or saved copy of this page is evidence of the terms that applied on the date shown above, not of any later version.
21. Contact
Report a wrong figure, request a calculator, or send a complaint or suggestion on the contact page. For a wrong figure, include the page URL and the Method and Data lines from Technical details. Questions about this agreement go to the same place. The FAQ answers common questions about data, privacy, and what a result is not.