Updated August 7, 2026. Quick answer: everything on this page is free to use with attribution, and there is nobody to ask. Below: paste-ready statistics with their sources, reusable charts, the open datasets, and — the part we think is actually worth your attention — a public register of every figure we publish and what makes each one change. No embargoes, no press list, no PR contact. If you need something that is not here, email and ask.
Paste-ready statistics
Each of these is written as a complete sentence you can lift, with its qualifier already in it — because the qualifier is usually the part that gets dropped. Every one is drawn from a page that carries its primary source.
The median American household aged 55 to 64 holds $16,600 in retirement accounts, against a mean of $306,404 — a gap that exists because roughly 43% of households in that age band hold nothing at all.
Source: CMG computation from Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances 2022 Summary Extract (RETQLIQ); SCF runs every three years · Retirement savings statistics
The share of US households with any life insurance has fallen from 69.2% in 1998 to 56.0% in 2022.
Source: ACLI Life Insurers Fact Book 2025, Table 9.5, tabulating Federal Reserve SCF 2022, read 2026-08-07 · Life insurance statistics
Twenty-nine states tax a long-term capital gain as ordinary income, giving it no preferential treatment at all; only 13 states do.
Source: Clear Money Guide, from state statutes and revenue departments via SQ-5, read 2026-08-06 · Capital gains tax by state
Sixteen US jurisdictions require an employer to disclose pay — but only 13 require the range to appear in the job posting itself.
Source: Clear Money Guide, from state statutes and agency sources via SQ-5 (34 statute / 16 official / 1 secondary), read 2026-08-06; spot-verified 10/10 against primary sources 2026-08-07 · Pay transparency laws by state
Fifteen US jurisdictions have a paid family leave programme, but Maryland’s is enacted and not yet paying and New Hampshire’s is voluntary for non-state employers.
Source: Clear Money Guide, from state statutes and administering-agency sources via SQ-5 (28 statute / 21 official / 2 secondary), read 2026-08-06; spot-verified 10/10 2026-08-07 · Paid family leave by state
Six US jurisdictions apply a convenience-of-the-employer rule, under which days a remote worker spends at home can still be taxed by the employer’s state.
Source: Clear Money Guide, from state statutes, regulations and department guidance via SQ-5 (31 statute / 20 official / 0 secondary), read 2026-08-06 · Convenience-of-the-employer rules by state
Seven US jurisdictions require no annual report from an LLC at all — though Delaware, one of them, still charges a $400 annual tax.
Source: Compiled from state fee schedules and statutes via the SQ-4 staged dataset (30 statute / 21 official / zero secondary), read 2026-08-06; regenerated and verdict-variance asserted at build… · LLC annual report requirements by state
The median US household aged 65 to 74 spends $50,068 a year, well below the $64,232 mean for the same age band.
Source: CMG computation from BLS CE PUMD Interview 2024, published under DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21786091; BLS republishes annually · Retirement spending statistics
Please keep the year and the denominator when you quote these. Almost every wrong personal-finance statistic in circulation was correct when it was published and lost its date on the way.
The part that is genuinely unusual: we publish what we do not know
We keep a register of every volatile figure on the site — currently 131 of them — recording not just the number and its source but what causes it to change: an IRS inflation adjustment, an SSA determination, an act of a legislature, a vendor changing a price. The register is public, and the page that displays it is generated from it, so the two cannot quietly disagree.
And it publishes its own gaps. That page states, on its face, that 30 of those figures are embedded inside calculator JavaScript where a content-level refresh cannot reach them, that 31 have no established movement class, and that a handful are tracked but unused. “A register whose gaps are visible can be checked; one whose gaps are invisible just looks complete.”
Why this should matter to you: if you are deciding whether to trust a figure from this site, the useful question is not whether we sound confident. It is whether we can tell you when the number goes stale and whether we admit what we cannot see. That is checkable, and we have made it checkable.
Charts, data and tables
- Charts — reusable SVG, with the source line drawn inside each image so the attribution survives a screenshot. No JavaScript, no tracking, no external request.
- Statistics — our own measured datasets, several with permanent DOIs.
- The figure register — all 131 tracked figures with their movement classes.
- Open data — the datasets behind the tables.
State-law tables, each covering all 51 jurisdictions including the ones with no law: pay transparency · paid family leave · convenience-of-the-employer · capital gains · LLC annual reports · life insurance free-look periods.
A note on the negative rows, because it affects how you can use them. In those tables the jurisdictions without a law are split into confirmed absent and not found. Only the first is safe to report as an absence. We publish the split rather than a single count precisely so that a number like “35 states have no such law” cannot be lifted from us without its caveat.
How we source and check things
The full account is on our methodology page and we will not repeat it here. The three points most relevant to someone deciding whether to cite us:
- We quote primary sources and record the date we read them. Statutes, agency pages and form instructions — not other people’s summaries of them.
- We publish what we could not verify. Pages carry explicit honest-gap notes where a figure could not be confirmed, and we would rather leave a number out than approximate it.
- Corrections are published, not quietly edited. Here. If you find something wrong, telling us is the fastest route to it being fixed.
Using any of it
Free to print, copy and share for any purpose, including commercially, with attribution — Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). No permission needed and no need to tell us.
There is no embargo system, no press list and no PR contact, because there is no communications function here to run one. Printable guides and workshop modules are on the same terms and the same self-serve basis.
If you want a cut of the data we have not published, or a figure checked before you run it, email [email protected]. We would rather answer a question than have a wrong number published, and we will tell you plainly if we do not know.
What this site is, in one paragraph
Clear Money Guide publishes retirement, tax and estate information for people making these decisions for themselves or for a parent. Most of what we publish carries no advertisement and no referral at all — every page linked from this one is ask-free — and where a page does carry a commercial link, it says so on the page. We are small, we are not a newsroom ourselves, and we do not pretend to be neutral about the things we think are wrong, such as tables that report an absence they never checked.
Corrected lines you can paste
These are replacement sentences, not debunks. Each one comes from an audit in the Provenance File, where the working is shown and the verdict is set against a taxonomy fixed before the evidence. All free to reuse with attribution under CC BY 4.0.
Transfer-on-death deeds by state
As of August 2026, 35 US jurisdictions authorise a transfer-on-death deed for real property and 16 do not. Delaware is the newest, effective December 2025. Florida does not authorise one and uses the Lady Bird deed instead; Connecticut’s 2026 bill died in committee.
How many Americans have a will
About 46% of US adults have a will (Gallup, 2021), and the figure rises steeply with age — 20% of adults under 30, 36% of those 30–49, 53% of those 50–64, and 76% of those 65 and older. A single national figure understates will-making among older adults, for whom it is most relevant.
The average inheritance
The Federal Reserve does not publish an average inheritance figure. Its analysis of the Survey of Consumer Finances (1995–2016) reports instead that about half of all inheritances are under $50,000, while transfers of $1,000,000 or more make up about 2% of transfers at death but 40% of the total dollars transferred — a distribution too skewed for an average to be meaningful.
The age of widowhood
There is no published federal statistic giving a median age of widowhood. The closest official measure is that among adults widowed in the preceding 12 months, 71% of men and 69% of women were 65 or older (US Census Bureau, from the 2016 ACS and 2014 SIPP), which places the typical age of widowhood well above 65.
Boomers turning 65
Pew Research Center projected in 2010 that about 10,000 baby boomers would turn 65 every day for the next 19 years, a window running to roughly 2030. That window is still open in 2026, and Census single-year-of-age data implies a current rate of roughly 11,400 people reaching 65 per day — though not all of them are boomers for much longer, since the cohort ends with births in 1964.
The 70% generational wealth claim
The Williams Group states that in approximately 70% of estate transfers, families lose control of their assets and become divided — a finding about family governance and unity, not about wealth being dissipated. No published methodology accompanies it, and neither a 90% figure nor a second-generation framing appears in the firm’s own material.
Each line links to an audit that shows its working, names what it could not establish, and states its evidence tier. Where we could not verify which publishers currently repeat a claim, the audits say so and name nobody.
A recent finding worth a look. Our state auto-IRA page tested a widely repeated claim — that these programmes quietly enrol people into Roth IRAs they may be ineligible for — and found it only half true: the default is a Roth, but CalSavers discloses the limit plainly. We published the refutation alongside the finding.
Reusing any of this? One licence covers all of it — free to reuse, adapt and republish, including commercially, with attribution. No permission needed. Figures we quote from the IRS, SSA, BLS or a state agency belong to their publishers and should be cited to them, with the data year.
Every dataset behind these figures is indexed at the data commons — what each one covers, how many rows it carries and when it last changed, measured from the pages themselves rather than from a hand-kept list. The archived citable versions, each with a permanent DOI, are at the research library: cite the DOI, read the page.
State-level figures: state money statistics carries one sheet per jurisdiction — every figure we hold about a state on a single page, each linked to the dataset that owns it and states its primary source. Cite as: Clear Money Guide, [State] Money Statistics 2026, with the sheet URL. Sheets differ in length because a short sheet means we hold less, not that the state has less.