Editorial Standards

Our Editorial Methodology: How We Research, Write, and Review Tax Guides

Every tax and insurance guide on 1099Hubs carries the same byline: Written and reviewed by the 1099Hubs Tax Team. That signature is deliberate. We do not attach a personal name to our tax content, because these guides are not the work of one person — they are the output of a research and review process that anyone can inspect. This page explains how that process works. If you read only one section, read "Where our numbers come from."

Who writes our guides

The 1099Hubs Tax Team researches, writes, and reviews every guide on this site. The team is an editorial group, not a licensed firm.

We want to be direct about what that means. 1099Hubs is not an accounting firm, a tax-preparation service, or a law firm. We do not know your income, your state, your entity structure, or your specific situation, so we cannot and do not give personalized tax advice. What we do instead is narrower, and we hope more useful: we take primary IRS documents and rewrite them as plain-English guides and tools that a 1099 freelancer, contractor, or gig worker can act on — checking a threshold, understanding a deadline, or deciding what to ask a professional.

Our job is to make the source material easier to use. It is not to replace the source material, or your accountant.

Where our numbers come from

This is the part that matters most. Every tax rate, income threshold, contribution limit, and filing deadline we publish has to trace back to a primary source. If we cannot point to where a figure comes from, it does not go on the page.

We build our guides from these categories of sources:

  • IRS Revenue Procedures — the annual inflation adjustments that set tax brackets, the standard deduction, and many other dollar figures for the coming year. When a number changes because of inflation, a Revenue Procedure is usually the legal origin of the change.
  • IRS Notices — the annual announcements that set retirement-plan and Health Savings Account contribution limits.
  • IRS Publications — the plain-language guidance documents, such as Publication 505 on estimated tax, Publication 587 on the home office deduction, Publication 969 on health savings accounts, Publication 974 on the premium tax credit, and Publication 15-B on fringe benefits.
  • IRS forms and their instructions — the primary paperwork behind our explanations, including Schedule C, Schedule SE, Form 8959, and Form 1040-ES, along with the official line-by-line instructions that accompany them.
  • Legislation — the text of tax law itself, as published by government legislative sources, when a rule changes because Congress changed it.
  • HealthCare.gov — the official marketplace source for health-coverage rules, enrollment windows, and subsidy mechanics.

We deliberately do not build guides out of other people's blog posts, calculator sites, or summaries. Secondary sources can help with orientation, but they are not where a number comes from. When a primary source and a secondary source disagree, the primary source wins, every time.

How often we update

Tax figures change on a schedule, and so do we.

At a minimum, we revisit every guide once a year, timed to the release of the IRS's annual inflation adjustments and annual contribution limits. When a new year's Revenue Procedure or Notice lands, the figures in our guides are rechecked against it, and anything that moved is updated.

Each page also displays a last-reviewed date, so you can see how current it is before you rely on it. When tax law changes outside the normal annual cycle — a new rule, a new threshold, a new form — we update the affected guides as soon as we can verify the change against a primary source, rather than waiting for the next scheduled pass.

How a guide is reviewed before it ships

No guide goes live until it has passed a review built on a fixed checklist. The review asks:

  • Does every number have a primary source? Any rate, threshold, limit, or date must be traceable to an IRS document, legislation, or HealthCare.gov. If a figure cannot be sourced, it is removed or rephrased.
  • Are the cited sources current and reachable? We check that each source still says what we claim it says, and that it reflects the tax year the guide covers.
  • Are the calculation examples recomputed for the current year? Worked examples are re-run using the current year's figures, not carried over from a previous edition.
  • Does the page show its status? Each guide carries a last-reviewed date and an estimated read time, so you can judge freshness and length before you commit to reading.

We treat this checklist as a floor, not a showcase. It is the least we owe a reader who is making a financial decision.

Our calculators

Our browser-based tools follow the same sourcing rules as our guides, and they share the same IRS-based assumptions. When you open one of our calculators, you are running our published figures — not a private formula you have to take on faith.

The tools are estimates, and we want them understood that way. They can help you sanity-check a number, model a scenario, or prepare questions for a professional. They do not file your return, they do not see your full financial picture, and they are not a substitute for tax-preparation software or a qualified professional. Where a tool relies on a simplification — a flat assumption, a rounding choice, or a single filing scenario — we say so on the page.

Corrections

We get things wrong sometimes, and when we do, we fix them.

If you spot an error, an out-of-date figure, or a source that no longer supports what we wrote, tell us about it through our contact page. We would rather correct a page than defend it. When a correction changes a number readers may have relied on, we update the guide and its last-reviewed date so the change is visible.

What we are not

To be clear and honest about our limits:

  • We are not an accounting firm, a CPA practice, or a tax-preparation service.
  • We are not a law firm, and nothing on this site is legal advice.
  • We do not provide personalized tax, legal, or financial advice for your specific situation.
  • We are not a substitute for official guidance from the IRS or your state tax authority.

Tax rules vary by state, by income, by entity type, and by facts we cannot see. Our guides aim to explain how the federal rules generally work and where the numbers come from. They are educational, and they are a starting point rather than a conclusion. For decisions that matter, verify the current figures in the primary sources yourself, and work with a qualified professional who can see your whole picture.

— The 1099Hubs Tax Team

Primary sources we link to

These are the government documents our guides are built from. All of them are free to read, and where one of them disagrees with anything on this site, the government document wins.