Authority page
Master directory of every primary public source CalcFi uses to build its free calculators. Each entry lists the agency, the official URL, what CalcFi pulls from it, the refresh cadence, and the most recent timestamp on which a refresh landed in our pipeline.
Last reviewed: ·Maintained by Jere Salmisto·See also methodology for how the math is built.
Most consumer finance calculators online quietly hide the source of their numbers. A tax bracket appears with no citation. A mortgage rate is presented as if it dropped from the sky. The CPI figure used inside an inflation calculator is six months stale because nobody refreshed it. The result is a large, popular surface of financial tools that you cannot audit, cannot reproduce by hand, and cannot trust when the stakes are high.
CalcFi is built the opposite way. Every figure on the site traces to a primary public source: an IRS publication, a Federal Reserve series, a Treasury yield table, a Census ACS estimate, a BLS release, a Social Security Administration table, a HUD income limit, a CFPB regulatory text, a Freddie Mac PMMS observation. The source is named on the calculator result. The “as of” date is shown next to the number. The external link points back to the agency that published it.
This page is the definitive directory of those sources. Each entry below is real and currently in the pipeline. The “Last pulled” timestamp reflects the actual ingest job that landed the most recent snapshot into our cache. When a source restates a prior value, our ingest layer re-pulls the affected history window and the change propagates to every calculator on the next revalidation cycle.
The page is grouped into three sections: federal sources (the bulk of CalcFi data, since CalcFi is a US-centric calculator site), international sources (used for global comparisons and currency context), and industry-fundamental sources (used as cross-checks rather than primary inputs).
11 primary sources in this category.
What CalcFi uses: Tax brackets, standard deduction, retirement contribution limits, Revenue Procedures (Rev. Proc. 2025-32 and prior), Publication 15 (Employer's Tax Guide), Publication 17 (Your Federal Income Tax), Form 8949 (capital gains reporting), Schedule SE rules.
What CalcFi uses: Daily Treasury yield curve rates (1mo through 30yr), TIPS yields, I-Bond fixed and inflation components, Treasury Direct savings bond rules.
What CalcFi uses: American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year and 5-year estimates: median household income, median home value, median rent, owner / renter counts by state and metro. Used across pSEO state and city pages.
What CalcFi uses: Real and nominal GDP, GDP per capita, Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index, state-level personal income, regional price parities.
What CalcFi uses: Consumer Price Index (CPI-U and CPI-W), Current Employment Statistics (CES), Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) tables.
What CalcFi uses: Federal funds rate, prime rate, 30-day SOFR, 1-month / 3-month / 1-year / 2-year / 10-year / 30-year Treasury constant maturities, M2 money supply, consumer credit outstanding, household debt service ratio.
What CalcFi uses: Annual Trustees Report, Fact Sheet, Average Wage Index, Maximum Taxable Earnings, full retirement age tables, COLA announcements, primary insurance amount (PIA) formula bend points.
What CalcFi uses: Fair Market Rents (FMR), Income Limits (Section 8, LIHTC, multifamily programs), USER Public Data Library, FHA mortgage limits.
What CalcFi uses: Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data, Loan Originator Compensation rule, Qualified Mortgage (QM) thresholds, ATR / QM rule definitions, prepaid card rule.
What CalcFi uses: Primary Mortgage Market Survey (PMMS): weekly 30-year and 15-year fixed mortgage rate national average. Underpins every CalcFi mortgage tool.
What CalcFi uses: National Rates and Rate Caps for deposit products: savings, checking, money market, certificate of deposit (CD) terms 1-month through 60-month.
4 primary sources in this category.
What CalcFi uses: World unemployment rate, labor force participation rate, working-age population. Powers the international comparison overlay on the unemployment-rate dataset.
What CalcFi uses: Cross-country macro comparisons: PPP-adjusted GDP per capita, household savings rate, harmonized inflation, tax revenue / GDP ratios.
What CalcFi uses: World Development Indicators: GDP per capita, inflation, population. Used for global context on the salary-by-state and GDP datasets.
What CalcFi uses: Euro area inflation (HICP), unemployment, GDP. Used in the eurozone GDP per capita and FX comparison context.
2 primary sources in this category.
What CalcFi uses: State insurance regulation reference, model laws cited inside life insurance and annuity calculator explainers. We do not consume NAIC pricing data; only regulatory framing.
What CalcFi uses: Existing Home Sales report context, median sales price by region. Used as a citation cross-check against Freddie Mac and Census ACS for the rent-vs-buy and city home-value datasets.
Equally important is the list of sources CalcFi deliberately avoids. CalcFi does not consume Bloomberg Terminal data, Refinitiv feeds, Morningstar premium series, S&P Capital IQ, or any other paid market data vendor. CalcFi does not scrape user-generated content, crowd-sourced “average” inputs, or affiliate-network rate tables. CalcFi does not buy lead lists from mortgage brokers to populate rate comparisons.
This is partly a cost discipline and partly an editorial one. Paid data is fine for institutional use cases, but it cannot be re-cited by the end user. A reader cannot click through to verify a Bloomberg figure the way they can click through to verify an IRS Revenue Procedure or a Federal Reserve series. Primary public data is auditable, reproducible, and free; that is the bar CalcFi enforces.
Every value on CalcFi is stored under a typed contract called SourcedValue<T> that pairs the value with a SourceRef record. The SourceRef carries the agency name, the dataset identifier, the URL, and the retrievedAt timestamp. The render layer pulls the contract straight through to the result panel so the citation cannot be lost in transit. If a value lacks a source reference, the build pipeline fails. This is the same audit-trail discipline Federal Reserve research notes ship with, applied to a consumer calculator surface.
For long-form context, see the methodology page (data plumbing, refresh cadence, editorial review), citations (third-party works citing CalcFi data), and the data hub (every pSEO state, city, and macro snapshot page that consumes these sources).
No. Every number on CalcFi comes from a free public primary source: IRS publications, Federal Reserve data, U.S. Treasury yield tables, Census ACS, Bureau of Labor Statistics releases, Social Security Administration tables, HUD Fair Market Rents, CFPB regulatory data, and Freddie Mac PMMS. We do not consume Bloomberg, Refinitiv, S&P, Morningstar, or any other paid feed. This is part of the free-only stack constraint that keeps CalcFi free for end users forever.
Refresh cadence depends on the publishing agency. Treasury yields and FRED rate series refresh nightly. Freddie Mac PMMS refreshes weekly on Thursday. BLS CPI and CES refresh monthly. Census ACS refreshes annually (1-year releases in September). IRS tax brackets and contribution limits refresh annually in October or November when the IRS publishes for the following tax year. The "Last pulled" column in the source tables above shows the most recent verified pull for each agency.
When a source agency restates a prior value (BLS occasionally revises CPI components two months back; FRED periodically revises GDP), our ingest job re-pulls the affected historical window and updates the cached series. Every calculator pulls from the cached series at request time, so a source restatement propagates automatically on the next ISR revalidation. Static reference tables (IRS brackets, SSA bend points) are updated by hand against the published PDF and the change is logged in the editorial methodology page.
Every calculator result panel shows a source line with the primary citation, an "as of" date, and an external link back to the source agency. Long-form explainer pages (the data hub and the journey pages) include in-line citations next to each cited figure. This is the same audit trail you would see on a Federal Reserve research note: the source is always one click away.
Yes. The CalcFi Open Data dataset mirrors 34 of the macro series used inside CalcFi calculators under a CC BY 4.0 license. It is available on Figshare, Zenodo, Hugging Face, Kaggle, data.world, DoltHub, and MotherDuck. See the open-data hub for the full distribution list. The 34 series are a representative subset; the full set of source endpoints lives behind the in-app calculators and pSEO pages on this site.