Sources and Data Policy

Official fee records in our database come from documents published by the utility or responsible public body. Each record links to its source and carries a verification date so you can check the charge yourself.

Sources we use

Qualifying primary sources include utility fee schedules, rate sheets, tariffs, ordinances, board resolutions, and official utility or government pages. We record the source organization, document title, URL, effective date or fiscal year when published, and the date we verified the record. Industry and consumer sources can inform national planning benchmarks, but they do not become official local fee rows.

Conflicting information

We compare effective dates, customer classes, meter sizes, fee bases, and the issuing authority. A newer applicable primary document takes precedence over an older one. If two current documents conflict or a condition is unclear, we flag the record for review rather than choosing a number without support. Contact the utility for the amount that applies to your property.

Citations and reuse

We link each official row to its source document and show its verification date. Facts in our dataset are free to reuse with attribution and a link to Utility Cost Guide’s fee database. The downloadable files contain our structured facts and source references; they are not a license to copy third-party documents or text. We do not scrape or republish copyrighted source text.

Download CSV or JSON. The public data endpoints are read-only; please use reasonable request rates and cache responses when practical.

Crawlers and link checks

AI and search crawlers may access public pages under the site’s published crawl rules. Our own automated source-link checks identify themselves as UtilityCostGuideBot/1.0. A successful link check confirms reachability, not that a fee is unchanged. See our corrections process to report a discrepancy.