How we research contractors, source ratings, build cost ranges, and decide what order companies appear in.
This site exists to help a homeowner get from "I need this work done" to a short list of contractors worth talking to. Everything below describes how that short list is built, and what we do not claim to know.
We do not verify licensing, insurance or bonding, and we do not call companies vetted, screened or guaranteed. Those words imply a check we have not performed. What we can tell you is what a state actually requires, with a link to the authority that issues it, and what to ask a contractor before you sign. Confirming credentials and permits is a step only you can take, and every project page says so.
We do not perform the work, and we are not a contractor. We match homeowners with companies that do.
Star ratings and review counts come from Google. For a company operating in many markets, one branch's score tells you very little about the crew that would turn up at your house, so where a company has at least five US locations with 100 or more reviews each, we publish a count-weighted mean across those locations and say how many it covers. Below that threshold a company keeps its single sourced listing, cited to that listing.
Where we cannot find a review population we can honestly publish, we publish no rating. A blank is more useful than a number we cannot stand behind.
Every published figure carries the month it was checked, and a figure shown next to a link is the figure that link supports.
Companies are ordered by rating, weighted by the number of reviews behind it, so a 5.0 from forty reviews does not outrank a 4.8 from twelve thousand. The weighting is computed from the roster itself each time the site is built rather than set by hand.
Order is not for sale. No company pays for position, and no placement is bought. Where a page says companies are ranked by customer rating, that is the order the page renders.
Cost ranges are modeled from published material prices and Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data for the relevant trade, not gathered from other sites. Local figures adjust the national range by the local trade wage, weighted by how much of that particular job is labor rather than material, which is why a high-wage metro is usually much closer to the national average than people expect.
Where a range is not modeled, the page says so rather than implying a derivation that does not exist. The full method is on our cost methodology page.
No range on this site is a quote. Only a written quote from a contractor who has seen your home is that.
When a page states something specific about a company — a warranty term, a material composition, an award, a certification — it comes from that company’s own published materials or from the body that issued it, and the page says which. Where a manufacturer publishes a figure we cannot independently verify, we attribute it to them rather than restating it as fact.
Some review pages carry a short substantiation block at the foot, listing the sources behind the specific claims on that page. That block is not the full list of everything we checked. It exists because those particular claims are the ones a reader is most likely to want to trace — a warranty they may rely on, or an award used as a selling point. A claim without an entry there is not an unsupported claim; the standards on this page apply to every sentence we publish.
Trademark and copyright notices are a separate matter from sourcing. Where they appear alongside a substantiation block they are there for attribution of the marks themselves, not as evidence for a claim.
If something here is wrong, we would rather know. Ratings, licensing facts and cost figures all carry the date they were checked, and a figure that has gone stale is a defect we want reported.
