Editorial policy

1. No invented statistics

Every number published on this site is either produced by arithmetic you can check, or attributed to a named primary source with the year it applies to. If a claim cannot be attributed, it is written without a number or it is not written at all.

This rules out most of what the resume industry repeats. The best-known example is the claim that applicant tracking systems automatically reject around 75% of resumes before a human sees them. That figure circulates on hundreds of career sites with no primary source behind it, and it exists because a robot gatekeeper is a useful thing to sell products against. We do not repeat it, and we explain why in full.

The same rule applies to the softer version of the same problem — "studies show", "recruiters spend six seconds on a resume", "most hiring managers say". If we cannot point at the study, we do not invoke it.

2. No outcome guarantees, and no fake precision

No tool on this site predicts whether you will get an interview or a job, and none of them produce an "ATS score". Nobody can do either honestly. A number that looks precise but means nothing is worse than no number, because it invites you to optimize against a metric that is not measuring anything.

The resume checker gives a score, and it says on the page exactly what that score is: a weighted count of specific, listed checks. Every check it runs is documented on the methodology page so you can judge whether you agree with it.

3. Every tool states what it does not do

The pay calculators estimate gross figures. They do not model your full tax position, they are not tax advice, and each one names the things it deliberately leaves out — the qualified business income deduction, state and local income tax, and so on. Where a calculator uses a published rate or limit, that value carries its year and a link to the source, and you can override it with a current figure.

Tools that touch legally sensitive ground carry the relevant caveat prominently. The severance calculator values an offer you have already received; it does not tell you what you are entitled to, because in the United States there is generally no statutory severance entitlement to calculate. The overtime calculator explains that state law is sometimes more generous than federal law. None of it is legal advice.

4. What we will not build

Some tools are popular precisely because they are the kind of thing people should not rely on a free web page for. We have deliberately not built:

• A take-home pay or withholding calculator. Payroll withholding is not tax liability, it varies by state and by the details of your W-4, and a wrong number causes real harm. Use your employer's payroll provider or a tax professional.
• An unemployment benefit estimator. There are fifty-one separate statutes with different base periods, formulas and maximums. Any single estimator would be wrong for most people who used it. Your state's official calculator is the right source.
• A retirement projection. The 401(k) match calculator tells you what your employer's match formula pays and what you are leaving unclaimed. It stops there deliberately, because growth projections require assumptions we would be making up.
• Anything that writes your documents for you and passes them off as yours. The generators structure and check material you provide. They do not invent achievements, and the example figures shown on profession pages are marked as placeholders to replace with your own.

5. Review and maintenance

Guides carry a visible publication date and, where the substance has changed, a review date. Those dates are only moved when the content actually changes — not on every deploy, which is a common trick for manufacturing the appearance of freshness.

Published rates and limits used by the calculators are reviewed annually, since most of them change with the tax year. Each is stamped in the page text and in a single clearly marked block in the source, so an update is one edit rather than a hunt.

6. Corrections

When something here is wrong, it gets fixed and the fix is logged publicly in the changelog with the date. That log already includes several real defects found in our own tools — a resume checker that counted phone-number digits as quantified achievements, and a bullet generator that produced ungrammatical output. Listing those is the point. A corrections policy that has never been exercised is decoration.

To report an error, email hello@freecareertools.com with the page address and what is wrong. Factual errors are prioritized over everything else.

7. Independence and money

This site is intended to be supported by display advertising. Advertising has no influence on what is published: there are no sponsored posts, no affiliate links, no paid placements in any tool or guide, and no advertiser sees content before it is published. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on the page in question and not buried here.

Full detail is on the advertising disclosure page.

8. How this content is produced

The tools themselves contain no artificial intelligence. They are deterministic — the same input always produces the same output — and they run entirely in your browser with no network calls, which is what makes the privacy claim on this site verifiable rather than a promise.

Written guidance is drafted and edited with software assistance and is reviewed by a person before publication. Accountability sits with the named author on each page, not with a tool. The rules above apply regardless of how a draft was produced, and the no-invented-statistics rule exists precisely because generated text is good at producing confident, plausible, unsourced numbers.