Editorial process

A wrong fuel tax rate or permit fee costs a carrier real money, so accuracy matters more than volume here. This page explains how Haul Handbook researches and verifies what it publishes. The companion methodology page covers the sourcing standard and the refresh cadence in full.

Who writes and reviews this

Haul Handbook is written and maintained by Evan Reid, founder of the site. He is not an attorney or a financial advisor, and the site does not provide legal or financial advice. What he does is compile the underlying facts from official agency sources and keep them current. Guides carry his byline, and the data tables show the source and the verification date for every fact.

Agency sources first

For every legal or financial fact, our source of truth is the body that owns the rule: FMCSA for operating authority, IFTA Inc. for the quarterly fuel tax matrix, IRP Inc. for apportioned registration, the IRS for the heavy vehicle use tax, and each state's DOT, DMV, or revenue department for state rules. Vendor blogs and filing service pages can point us toward a question, but they are never the citation for a fact.

Every fact carries a source

On our reference tables and state pages, each displayed rate, fee, threshold, or deadline renders from a structured data record that carries its own source link and verification date. If a fact has no resolvable source, an automated audit flags it and the page does not ship. That is a hard rule enforced on every build, not a style preference.

Data quality is labeled honestly

A fact is labeled as agency-verified only when an official government or program source backs it. When we cannot confirm a detail, the page says so and shows nothing in its place. We never fill a gap with a guess, an average, or a number from a secondhand site.

Facts before prose

We author the structured, sourced facts before we write the explanatory guides, and the prose must match the data. When a rate or rule changes, we update the data first and the writing follows. If the two ever disagree, the sourced data wins and the prose gets fixed.

Independence from monetization

Recommendations of paid services stay separate from our description of the public process. An affiliate relationship never changes a rate, a fee, or a requirement on any page. See the affiliate disclosure for how the site makes money.

Corrections

Agencies change fees and forms constantly, and we get things wrong sometimes. If you spot an error, email [email protected] or use the contact page and we will verify and fix it. We would rather be corrected than be confidently wrong.