Methodology — How Figures Are Sourced & Verified

By Bilal Butt, founder — not a licensed attorney. Last verified: October 2026.

This page explains how every figure on Family Law Cost Hub is sourced, verified, dated, and labelled — and what is deliberately not published. It is the page to read if you want to judge whether to trust a number here.

Estimate vs law

Three kinds of figure appear on this site, and they are labelled differently. Verified law: a formula, cap, percentage or fee taken from a statute, court rule, agency schedule or government guidance, with the source linked on the page. Guideline illustration: a worked example computed from verified law, showing its arithmetic so it can be checked. Industry estimate: a total-cost range from firm guides or surveys, always labelled as an industry estimate and never as an official statistic — used only for divorce totals, because no court publishes a total divorce cost. Anything that fits none of those three categories is not published. Where a figure could not be verified, the page says so instead of publishing it.

How research was done

Batch-1 research (October 2026) covered Texas, California, New York and Illinois child support; UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand child support; Illinois, New York, Texas, Massachusetts, Colorado and Florida alimony; and California, Texas, Florida and New York divorce filing fees and cost routes. A second verification pass (October 2026) re-checked the blocking items against official or primary sources. Items resolved in that pass include: New York's $193,000 child support cap and $241,000 maintenance cap plus $21,546 reserve (NY Unified Court System 2026 update); Illinois's $2,477 schedule figure as the official 2025 HFS value (a claimed 2026 value from a single secondary source is not used); the UK default rate of £39 (the £38 summary-page figure is outdated); California §4061 add-ons as proportional to adjusted net incomes (the 50/50 split was pre-September-2024 law); Texas's low-income threshold under $1,000; Canada's age-of-majority list and the fixed (not indexed) $150,000 figure; Illinois's 146-night shared-care rule as current law, with 110 nights only from 1 January 2027; Australia's fixed assessment of $1,825 capped at three times that amount; and the finding that Australian and New Zealand dependent allowances have no flat dollar figure and must be computed or omitted.

Still unverified — deliberately not published as settled fact

• The New York OTDA LDSS-4515 chart PDF itself (the $193,000 cap is cited to the Unified Court System update, not to the PDF as opened).
• An official HFS 2026 schedule PDF (2025 values are used and labelled as such).
• The Judicial Council schedule line for California's FL-700 joint-petition fee ($870 is published on strong secondary consensus, with that source note kept).
• Quebec 2026 dollar parameters (secondary only; Quebec's own-model warning is published instead).
• The UK CMS £3,000/week cap's day-month commencement date (published as the 2012-scheme cap, without an invented date).
• New Zealand's full administrative-review grounds and current-Act termination list; Australia's Family Tax Benefit interaction; New York's $25/$50 low-income mechanics in statute text; and a dedicated Texas total-divorce-cost source.

What calculators do and do not do

Calculators on this site apply the guideline formula exactly as written, show the cap check, and state who pays. They do not model deviation, imputation of income, add-ons beyond what the page states, tax consequences, or enforcement. Ceiling checkers for Texas, Massachusetts and Florida alimony output a ceiling and duration caps only — never a predicted award. Guide pages for Illinois child support, Canada, Australia and New Zealand show the method and checked examples instead of a calculator, because their law uses a schedule table, province tables, or computed allowances that a simple formula would misstate.

Attorney review

Independent attorney review: pending. No licensed attorney has reviewed the figures on this site yet, and no reviewer is named anywhere on the site until that review actually happens. Until then, every page states that the founder is not a licensed attorney and that figures are estimates, not legal advice. Review, when it happens, will be logged on the corrections page with the reviewer's name, jurisdiction and date — or not claimed at all.

Advertising, analytics and consent (interim position)

No advertising or analytics script is loaded in this build, and no AdSense publisher identifier or analytics identifier exists on the site. The cookie notice on each page is an interim notice only: it stores a dismissal preference in browser local storage, does not record advertising consent, and is not a Google-certified consent management platform. Before AdSense is enabled for UK or EU visitors, the interim notice must be replaced by a Google-certified CMP (for example via Funding Choices or another certified provider), the privacy policy must be updated to name the actual vendors, and ad placement must stay away from calculator buttons and results. The deploy checklist in the site folder states the same gates. The privacy policy gives the full advertising and consent position.

Corrections

Errors are corrected on the corrections page with a date and a description, and the affected page's change log is updated. Figures are not silently changed. Report an error via contact with the page, your inputs, what the site showed, and your source.

Coming next (planned expansion — no figures yet)

The following pages are planned, in this order, once fresh official research is completed for each: Canadian provinces (Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta) as separate child support pages; UK divorce costs for England and Wales; and more US states, chosen by search volume. No figure for any of these pages is published anywhere on this site yet, and none will be until its official source is checked. Embeddable calculators are also planned as a link-building route, once the core pages are indexed and the attorney-review position is settled.

Change log