How this site works, and what it will never do

A listing reaches the directory by one of three routes. In every case the organization controls whether it stays.

1. Public records. State licensing boards, registered-apprenticeship records held by the U.S. Department of Labor and state apprenticeship agencies, Secretary of State business registrations, and the published rosters of recognised accreditors. These are the records that already exist because the organization is licensed, registered or accredited.
2. Direct outreach. We contact organizations that appear in those records and ask them to confirm their details. Confirmation is voluntary. Declining to respond does not lower a listing; it simply leaves it unverified.
3. Organization submission. An organization asks to be listed through our submission process. Submission is free and confers no advantage beyond the verification that follows.

Consent is a requirement, not a courtesy

A listing appears in the public directory only where the organization has consented to it, or where the listing is drawn entirely from a public record that the organization created by being licensed, registered or accredited. Any organization can withdraw consent at any time. When it does, the listing comes down. We do not require a reason, we do not ask the organization to justify the request, and we do not maintain a shadow copy of a withdrawn listing for internal ranking purposes.

We publish only business contact information — the details an organization already advertises to the public. We do not publish home addresses, personal mobile numbers, owners’ personal details or anything obtained from a source that was not intended to be public.

We publish lawfully public business facts — the same information a licensing board or Secretary of State already makes available because the organization chose to be licensed or registered.

Every meaningful field carries a source name, source URL where available, and a checked date. We do not imply partnership, sponsorship, or endorsement.

An unclaimed profile is not a negative signal; it means we have not yet connected with the owner to confirm details. We never deliberately make unclaimed profiles worse to force a claim.

Disputes, corrections, and removals are handled without requiring a reason. See Corrections and /listings/update.

Unclaimed profiles ship without photos. We do not scrape Google Business Profile images, social photos, or third-party galleries.

Photos appear only when supplied by the business, licensed for our use, or submitted by a homeowner with consent and moderation (PB-17).

If you believe we published an image you own without permission, email listings@truetradepath.com with the URL — we remove promptly.

Directory results are ordered by four inputs, applied in this sequence. The sequence is the whole of the ranking logic.

Two kinds of review, labelled differently

A verified experience is a review where the reviewer supplied evidence of the transaction — an invoice, a work order, a permit number or a dated estimate — and we confirmed that the evidence refers to the organization being reviewed. We do not publish the document and we do not share it with the organization.

An unverified community review is an opinion submitted without evidence of a transaction. We publish it because it may be useful, we label it clearly because it may be wrong, and we never let it drive a verification badge or a ranking position.

What organizations can and cannot do

An organization may publish a response beneath any review of it. The response appears in full, attributed to the organization, and is not edited by us for tone.

An organization can never edit a user’s review, hide it, delete it, or have it removed by asking us. There is no paid route and no relationship route to removing a negative review. This holds regardless of whether the organization advertises with us, has completed verification, or disputes the account. If an organization believes a review is factually false it can respond publicly and it can send us evidence; the review stays unless the evidence shows it is fraudulent under the test below.

Fraudulent reviews

We remove reviews we determine to be manufactured rather than mistaken. The signals we act on are coordinated submission from a single source, review text describing work the organization does not perform, wording that matches a known paid-review template, submissions traceable to a competitor, and reviews offered in exchange for payment or a discount. Where the pattern is deliberate we remove the entire cluster, and we will remove positive fraudulent reviews as readily as negative ones — a business inflating its own rating is committing the same act as one attacking a rival. Repeated manipulation costs an organization its verification badge.

Calculators run entirely in your browser. Nothing you type into a tool is transmitted to us or stored on a server. The logic is deterministic: the same inputs always produce the same result, and every result is shown with the assumptions that produced it.

The underlying figures come from named, dated sources:

• Wage and employment figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, cited with the survey period.
• Code-derived calculations built from the published requirements of the National Electrical Code, International Residential Code and International Plumbing Code, with the edition stated.
• Equipment service lives and performance data from manufacturer documentation and industry association research.
• Cost ranges assembled from published contractor pricing, regional cost indices and material pricing, with the collection period stated.

What the tools are not

Every tool on this site is a planning aid. None of them is professional advice, legal advice, an engineering determination, or a statement of what your jurisdiction will approve. Code requirements depend on the edition your jurisdiction has adopted and on local amendments, and they are interpreted by the authority having jurisdiction, not by us. Cost estimates describe typical ranges, not your job; a competent quote from someone who has seen the site beats any range we can publish. Where work will be inspected, where safety is involved, or where a permit is required, the calculation must be confirmed by a licensed professional before it is relied upon.

Our full sourcing rules, review cadence and corrections process are set out in the editorial policy.

True Trade Path is funded by display advertising. Advertisements are served into fixed slots, are labelled as advertising, and are the only source of revenue that touches this site. We do not charge for listings, we do not charge for verification, we do not operate a subscription, and we do not sell leads.

The constraints we place on ad placement — including the rule that an advertisement never appears between you and a tool’s inputs or its results — are set out in the advertising disclosure.

We publish numbers, and numbers go wrong. If something on this site is inaccurate we want to hear about it, and we would rather hear about it from you than leave it up.

Send corrections to corrections@truetradepath.com. Include the page address, the specific figure or statement at issue, and what you believe the correct information is. A source we can check makes the correction faster.

Our commitments on timing:

• We acknowledge every correction request within three business days.
• We resolve substantiated corrections within ten business days of acknowledgement, or tell you why it will take longer.
• We correct errors that materially change a result, a range or a recommendation immediately on confirmation, without waiting for a review cycle.
• Substantive corrections are recorded on the page itself, with the date and a description of what changed. We do not quietly edit a figure and reset the review date.

Requests to correct or remove a directory listing follow a separate route, set out at update or remove a listing.