Editorial Policy
Government Phone Guide covers Lifeline eligibility, income limits, and provider information — the kind of content Google classifies as Your Money or Your Life (YMYL), where accuracy directly affects whether someone gets a benefit they’re entitled to. This page explains exactly how we research, verify, and keep that information current.
Our Sourcing Standards
Every factual claim on this site traces back to one of these sources, in order of authority:
- The FCC — for federal program rules, minimum service standards, and regulatory changes
- USAC and LifelineSupport.org — the organization that administers Lifeline on the FCC’s behalf, including income limits, the National Verifier process, and enrollment data
- State utility commissions — for California, Texas, and Oregon’s separate application systems, and any state-level supplements
- Each provider’s own official pages — for plan details, devices, and coverage, cross-checked against what the provider actually ships rather than what their advertising promises
We don’t build content from other blogs, forums, or aggregator sites. If a claim can’t be traced to one of the sources above, we don’t publish it.
How We Verify Information Before Publishing
Before any page goes live, the specific figures on it — income limits, benefit amounts, provider availability — are checked directly against the source, not carried over from a previous article or assumed to still be accurate. Every page displays a “last verified” date so you can see exactly how current the information is, rather than guessing from a generic publish date.
Update & Review Schedule
Income limits: reviewed every January, when the Department of Health and Human Services publishes new Federal Poverty Guidelines, and updated immediately if the 135% Lifeline threshold changes.
Provider availability by state: re-checked on a quarterly cycle, since which carriers serve which states — and what devices they’re currently offering — shifts more often than program rules do.
Program status pages (like our page on the Affordable Connectivity Program’s end): reviewed whenever there’s a regulatory signal that something might change, not on a fixed schedule.
Corrections
If you find something outdated or incorrect — a provider that’s stopped serving your state, a dollar figure that’s changed, anything that doesn’t match the official source — we want to know. Reach us through our contact page with what you found and, if you have it, a link to the current official information. We investigate every report against the source and correct confirmed errors as soon as we can verify the change.
What This Site Is and Isn’t
Our eligibility checker and income limit tables give you an estimate based on the rules as we understand them. They are not a final determination — that authority belongs to USAC’s National Verifier or your state’s own system. Nothing on this site should be treated as legal or financial advice, and where our information and an official source disagree, the official source is correct. When that happens, please tell us so we can fix it.
Editorial Independence
This site is supported by display advertising and some provider referral relationships, detailed on our advertising disclosure page. Those relationships never determine what we write. A provider review reflects what that provider actually offers based on our research, regardless of whether we have a referral relationship with them.
Who Writes and Reviews This Content
Content is researched and maintained by Alen Sahak, using the source hierarchy described above. See our About page for more on the research process behind this site.