Methodology

Most trucking compliance content fails in one of two ways: it cites other blogs instead of the agency, or it goes stale the quarter after it is written. This page states the standard we hold every fact to, so you can judge for yourself whether to trust a number you read here. The short version: agency sources only, a visible source on every fact, and a fixed re-verification cadence with an automated gate behind it.

The sourcing standard: the agency that owns the rule

Every legal or financial fact on this site comes from the body that owns it, not from a summary of a summary. That means:

• FMCSA (fmcsa.dot.gov) for operating authority, USDOT numbers, insurance filing rules, and safety requirements.
• IFTA Inc. (iftach.org) for the quarterly fuel tax rate matrix.
• IRP Inc.for apportioned registration rules, and each state's IRP office for its own procedures.
• The IRS for Form 2290 and the heavy vehicle use tax, and ucr.gov for the UCR fee brackets.
• State agencies, the DOT, DMV, PUC, or revenue department, for intrastate authority, oversize permit fees, and weight-distance taxes.

Vendor content, factoring company blogs, permit service pages, and filing agent sites, is never a citation. At most it points us toward a question we then answer from the agency.

Every fact carries its own provenance

Behind every displayed rate, fee, threshold, and deadline is a structured data record, not a sentence someone typed into a page. Each record stores the source (title, publisher, and URL), the date we last verified it, and a data quality label. The source badge you see next to a figure renders straight from that record, so the citation you can check is the citation we actually used.

Three rules keep that honest:

• No source, no ship. An automated audit fails the build when a displayed fact lacks a resolvable source. It runs on every publish, with no manual override.
• Data before prose. Guides are written from the structured records, and a reconciliation audit compares the rendered text against the data. When they disagree, the data wins and the text gets fixed.
• Unconfirmed means empty. When we cannot confirm a detail from an official source, the field stays empty with a note. We never fill a gap with a guess or a number from a secondhand site.

The quarterly IFTA refresh promise

Stale fuel tax rates are the most common failure in trucking content, because IFTA Inc. publishes a new rate matrix every quarter and old articles keep ranking long after their numbers die. Our answer is a standing cadence: we re-verify the IFTA rate tables against the official matrix every quarter, and an automated freshness gate blocks publishing when the newest verified rate data is more than 92 days old. A stale quarter cannot ship quietly, because the build refuses to produce it.

Cadences for everything else

Slower-moving data sets carry an annual budget: UCR brackets, permit fees, intrastate authority rules, IRP procedures, and weight-distance tax rules are each re-verified on their own schedule, and the same freshness gate flags any set that goes past its budget. Every page shows its last-verified date, so you never have to wonder how old a number is.

Who does this work

The data is compiled and maintained by Evan Reid, founder of Haul Handbook. He is not an attorney or a financial advisor, and this site does not give legal or financial advice; the disclaimer covers what that means. The editorial process page describes how the writing itself is produced and reviewed.

Check us

The whole point of visible sourcing is that you do not have to take our word for anything. Follow the source badge on any fact and compare. If the agency page and our page disagree, the agency is right and we want to know: report it and we will fix it and update the verification date.