How we verify state rules

Two statuses, and no room between them

Every field in the rule registry — an agency name, a citation, a drill frequency, a retention period, a single mandate — carries one of exactly two statuses. The vocabulary is deliberately too small to hide in.

Verified

Read against the primary source — the state's own regulation, statute or licensing agency — and recorded with the citation and the date we read it.

On the page: Printed with its citation. This is the only status a tool will count a deadline from.

Pending review

We hold a value but have not confirmed it against primary text. Every one of these carries a written note of exactly what a person has to open to settle it.

On the page: Labelled on the page as unconfirmed, and never used to assert a deadline. It tells you which agency to ask.

Right now 273 of 298 fields are verified — 92% — and the remaining 25 each carry a written note of what a person has to open to settle them. Those notes are not internal. They are what the state pages print instead of a confident sentence.

Primary sources only

A citation here points at the state’s own regulation, statute or licensing agency — the text a surveyor would hold up. Not a summary, not a trade-association explainer, not another compliance vendor, and not a search result about the rule. If the primary text cannot be reached, the field stays pending and says so rather than borrowing somebody else’s reading of it.

Where a practice is industry convention rather than law, it is labelled as convention and is never given a borrowed code citation. That is the single most common way compliance content goes wrong, and it is the one we spend the most effort not doing.

Rules change, so pages carry dates

Every page that states a requirement shows when its content was last checked. A regulation cited without a date is a claim about the present tense that nobody has agreed to keep true. Ours is dated so you can judge how stale it is — and so we can be held to re-reading it.

What a document can and cannot do

Requirements are classified by what discharges them: plan text, something to post, something to file for approval, something to do, something to keep, or something to install. Only plan text prints inside an emergency plan. The other 104 of the 126 requirements catalogued here are listed as actions on a separate sheet, because printing a fire-drill requirement inside a plan implies the drill happened when a plan was printed.

Four things this site will not claim

• A state absent from a list has no rule.It means we have not verified one. Absence of a finding is not a finding, and every list here says so where it ends.
• A blank field means “not required”.A blank means not researched. The deposit rules carry this in the code itself — null is never rendered as “no requirement”.
• A document proves compliance.Of the 126 requirements catalogued here, 104 are things somebody has to do, post, file, keep or install. A plan prints the 44 that are plan text and lists the rest as actions, because printing them inside a plan would imply they were discharged by printing.
• This is legal advice, or an approval.CompliMaint issues no permits, grants no approvals and makes no determinations. Your licensing agency and your authority having jurisdiction do, and they are the only ones who can.

Where the gaps are, published

Coverage is uneven and the numbers above say where. Security deposit rules are verified for 26 of 50 states; the other 24 are absent from the tool rather than guessed at. Fire drill frequency is verified for 37 of 48 rule sets across 33 states. Staff and resident training rules are verified for 7 rule sets, of which 3 carry a deadline counted from a date you enter.

A state missing from any of those lists is a state we have not finished, not a state without a rule. Everything on the site is built so that the honest answer to “does my state require this?” can be “we have not checked” without the tool breaking.

Checked by the build, not by memory

The rules above are enforced by scripts that run against the registry, not by discipline. A verified field with no source fails the build. A coverage figure typed into a page instead of computed fails the build. So does a page claiming a state is covered when the registry has no entry for it. This page is included: every number on it is counted from the registry at build time, which is why it can be trusted to be current rather than aspirational.

What we are not

CompliMaint issues no permits, grants no approvals and makes no determinations. Nothing here is legal advice. Your licensing agency and your authority having jurisdiction are the only ones who decide whether you comply, and where our reading and theirs differ, theirs is the one that counts.

If you find something wrong, it is worth telling us — corrections to a cited rule are the only kind of feedback that changes what every other visitor sees. Who we are · the rules in plain language · the tools that act on them