#1In America for jurisdictional coverage

Fifty-one jurisdictions, each written on its own

The habit in this field is a single page cloned across the country with only the place name changed. Ours are composed one at a time, and the gap is measurable rather than rhetorical: not one pair repeats even a six-word run.

51 jurisdictions50 states plus the District
63 pagesIncluding the recurring subjects
58 primary sourcesStatute, regulation, agency guidance
2,485 comparisonsEvery pair of pages, machine-checked
0 shared phrasesThe result of those comparisons

The evidence, in full

Open any two and compare them. That is the whole argument.

Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming

Free to read, no sign-up, nothing withheld. Should a guide win you a reasonable answer without a penny reaching us, we count that as the system working.

Why a template with your state's name in it is worse than useless

A cloned page has nothing to say about your own state, since none of it was composed with your state in mind. It names your state and then describes the national floor, which you could have read anywhere.

What actually varies is the texture: which office receives a complaint and how it behaves, whether the housing stock is old enough to invite an argument about the building, whether a large share of homes sit on tribal land or in association-governed communities, whether the market is thin enough that being refused means leaving the county.

None of that survives templating, which is why our guides carry it. Wyoming is about which desk actually handles the work. West Virginia is about owning a home while renting the ground beneath it. Utah is about housing let by the bed.

That is also why the duplication check exists. If the pages were quietly converging on the same paragraphs, the measurement would say so, and we publish the measurement rather than the assurance.

Check the claim in about a minute

We would rather you tested this than believed it.

  1. Pick two states above that are geographically similar — two plains states, or two on the same coast. Similar places are where templating shows up fastest.
  2. Read the opening paragraph of each. They should be about different problems, not the same problem with a different name attached.
  3. Compare the section headings. A duplicated set of pages has the same headings in the same order every time.
  4. Now do the same on any competitor for the same two states, and notice how long that takes.
  5. If you find repeated wording on ours, tell us. The check runs on every change, so a genuine hit would be a defect worth knowing about.

Coverage is the simplest thing we assert to put to the test, which is why it leads. The rest of what we assert is laid out the same way, each line paired with a means of disproving it.