Data methodology
How every amount, rule and date on this site is collected, labeled, verified, versioned and corrected.
1. Sources
Only public carrier documents and pages (rate guides, service guides, tariffs, surcharge notices, fuel pages): every source on this site is a UPS or FedEx document or page. Third-party articles are not cited. No carrier APIs, no scraping, no logged-in pages. Every source is in the source registry with its title, URL, publication date, effective date and the date it was last checked.
2. Labels
| Label | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Verified | Confirmed against the carrier’s own published document. |
| Pending verification | The UPS or FedEx document is identified and linked, but this figure has not yet been compared line by line against it. |
| Unavailable | Cannot be reliably established from a permitted source. |
| est. | Calculated from the carrier’s published table (for example a fuel percentage computed from UPS’s fuel table and the EIA index before UPS posts it). Never shown as carrier-published. |
| stale | An older figure shown because no newer one has arrived; always shown with its week. |
Data types are kept apart: published (carrier list amount), contract (only what a user enters; never stored), estimate (labeled), forecast (none are published as fact; scenarios are labeled as hypothetical) and historical (prior effective periods, never overwritten).
3. Effective-date versioning
Each amount belongs to a period with a start and end date and a source. Tools price the date you choose, so a page viewed in December 2026 shows the amounts in force that day at each carrier, even though the carriers change on different dates. Rules (thresholds, minimum weights, precedence) are versioned the same way and covered by automated tests that run before every deployment.
4. Verification
“Verified” is set only after the figure has been compared line by line with the carrier’s own document. Software tools, including AI assistants, help read documents and draft entries; see how we get our data. The verification date is a stored field that changes only when that comparison is repeated. Viewing a page, a cache refresh or a scheduled job never changes it.
5. Automated updates and review
- Fuel: a scheduled job runs every six hours, reads the sister site’s weekly fuel feed, keeps the last good copy, records each week once, and holds any figure that moves more than 3.00 percentage points week over week for editorial approval. Failures raise an alert.
- Amounts, rules and changes: entered by an editor in versioned data files, tested and reviewed before deployment. Nothing collected automatically is published without review.
- Dates: pages are cached for at most six hours and never past midnight U.S. Central, so a new effective date takes effect the same day.
6. Calculations
Dimensions are rounded up to the next inch and weight to the next pound. Precedence rules (one Additional Handling charge; none with Large Package / Oversize) follow each carrier’s documents; where a rule comes from a summary it is marked pending. The Cost Index method is published in full.
7. Search data
The site does not publish search volumes. Internal keyword planning uses estimates that are marked unverified until checked in Google Search Console or a keyword tool.
8. Coverage and roadmap
Covered: U.S. domestic package accessorials for UPS and FedEx from Dec. 2025, the 2026–27 demand periods, weekly fuel, and year-by-year history in the Accessorial Time Machine (UPS from 2018, FedEx from 2020). Planned: base-rate history, international-only charges, pickup and billing fees.
9. Corrections
See the correction policy and log.