About PennyCompass

What we do

PennyCompass publishes free finance calculators for the United States and 32 additional countries. We cover taxes, paycheck and take-home pay, retirement, mortgages, equity compensation, crypto tax, freelance and business finance, personal finance, and insurance.

Our publication standard is to build each calculator around official primary sources from the relevant jurisdiction, including tax authorities, pension agencies, central banks, and government publications. Verified pages identify their sources and last review date. A page identified with unverified current inputs is labeled, restricted from search, or corrected rather than presented as an authoritative calculation.

Why this site exists

Most finance calculators on the open web fall into two buckets. The first is the giant finance portal (Bankrate, NerdWallet, SmartAsset), these are excellent at scale but sometimes simplify too much to be useful for specific situations. The second is the lead-gen tool from a tax firm or brokerage, these are accurate but built to funnel customers into a product, not to answer your question.

We are building a third option: deep, jurisdiction-aware, ad-supported tools that don’t require login, don’t up-sell you, and are precise enough to actually plan with. Our goal is to maintain a useful, source-cited toolkit for every jurisdiction we currently support.

Who we are

The PennyCompass team builds and maintains the calculators and guides on this site. Verified tools are checked against official tax-authority, social-security, pension-agency, or central-bank sources and show when their inputs were last reviewed. As we audit the catalogue, tools found to contain unverified inputs are labeled, restricted, or corrected rather than presented as filing-ready. Each verified page explains its calculation method and links the sources needed to inspect the result.

You can reach us via the contact page.

Editorial process

1. Each calculator must be checked against the relevant primary source for its country before it is treated as verified (for example an IRS publication, HMRC guidance, a state or provincial revenue schedule, or a central-bank notice).
2. The calculation logic is implemented in TypeScript. High-impact shared formulas receive boundary tests, and worked examples are checked against the same inputs used by the tool.
3. Verified pages list the specific sources they use and the date of the material review. Pages still awaiting review are clearly limited or withheld from search.
4. Time-sensitive figures are queued for re-check when a tax year or underlying law changes. A page date is not represented as a verification date unless that review actually occurred.
5. These tools are educational and not personal financial advice. We are engaging credentialed reviewers per jurisdiction and will name them here as they come on board.

See the full methodology for details.

How we’re funded

This site is supported by display ads and affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you click an affiliate link and complete a purchase. Affiliate relationships never affect how we compute or present calculator results.

See disclaimer and privacy policy for the full details.