How we check our figures

Anyone can say their figures are accurate. This page tells you how ours are checked, when they were last checked, and what we have not verified. We publish this because a benefits figure that is confidently wrong is worse than no figure at all — it stops someone claiming.

Rates carry the date they apply from

Every figure a Budget can move is stored with the date it took effect, so the calculators answer with the rates that were actually in force on the day you ask about, rather than whatever was hard-coded when the page was written. Our rates are currently confirmed to 31 December 2027, from Budget 2027.

Past that date the tools say so on screen instead of quietly guessing, and our pre-deploy check fails outright — it refuses to let the site go out with figures we cannot stand over. The next Budget is 6 October 2027, with most rates applying from 1 January 2028.

All of this is public: what changed at the official source lists every rate change with its start date, the figures we corrected and why, and each watched page where an amount moved, rebuilt every night with an RSS feed; rate history shows each payment's figures year by year from the same dated series; and did you get it? publishes what readers told us happened after they applied, payment by payment, once enough have.

1. Every figure is tied to the page it came from

We keep a register of every money figure the site quotes — a rate, a threshold, a disregard — together with the official page it came from and the exact wording that must still appear there. Today that is 714 figures: 295 from GOV.UK, 193 from nidirect, 100 from Citizens Information, 73 from gov.ie, 9 from Revenue and 44 from 21 other sources, mostly public bodies such as the SEAI and the NHS.

A script fetches each official page and checks the figure is still there. It runs two tests, and the second is the one that catches real problems:

• Is it still true at source? Catches a rate changing under us — Budget day moves dozens at once.
• Is it still on every page of ours that quotes it? Catches the commoner failure: a rate changes, one page gets updated, and three others quietly keep the old number.

That second check is not hypothetical. It is how we found a page titled “Domiciliary Care Allowance 2026: Rate, Dates & How to Apply” that contained no rate at all, and a grants checker still using last year’s Fuel Allowance figure. Both were fixed the day the check first ran.

2. The calculators are tested against official worked examples

A calculator can apply a rule perfectly to the wrong number, or the right number through a wrong rule. So we run 675 known-answer tests against the calculators’ real code — not a copy of it — and the expected answers come from the Department’s own published examples, not from whatever our code currently returns.

For example, the Department’s means-assessment guidelines work through a partner earning €120 gross with €17 of deductions over four days. Their answer is €25.80. Our calculator has to produce €25.80 or the build fails.

3. The eligibility rules are proved consistent

The rules that decide which entitlements you are shown exist in two forms: the original code, and a structured dataset extracted from it. We run 544 synthetic household profiles through both and compare all 5,637 resulting matches. They have to be identical.

What we have not verified

Why we print the date

Each of our calculators carries a line like “142 figures verified against gov.ie on 11 October 2026”. The count and the sources are generated from the register itself, so the line cannot drift from what is actually checked.

That is deliberate. A date is only worth printing while it is true, which makes keeping the register current a visible obligation rather than a good intention.

What happens to what you type

Nothing you enter leaves your device. The checkers and calculators run entirely in your browser. There is no account, no sign-up, and we do not store, transmit or sell your answers. Saving a result writes it to your own browser storage only, which is why clearing your browser loses it.

Who pays for this

Today the site is paid for by its founder and by optional reader tips. There are no adverts, no affiliate links and no sponsorship, and nobody pays to appear on a page.

We plan to earn money by licensing our checker and rates engine to organisations such as advice services, charities, credit unions or public bodies, and we may apply for public enterprise grants. Anyone who pays us will be named on how we make money, and none of them gets a say over what a page says about your entitlements.

Using our tools on your own site or for your members? See Partners. We are happy to walk any organisation through the checks above before they use anything of ours.