Updated August 10, 2026. Quick answer. Clear Money Guide publishes three live CSV endpoints, updated on their own edition cycle, free to fetch programmatically — no API key, no rate limit we enforce, no authentication. This page documents them for anyone building against them directly (a script, a dashboard, an app). For citation-formatted, methodology-first access to the same and other datasets, see the research library instead.
The endpoints
| Endpoint | Format | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
GET /data/advisor-statistics-2026.csv | CSV, commented header | SEC-registered investment adviser counts and regulatory AUM by state, 2026 edition |
GET /data/estate-probate-2026.csv — superseded 13 August 2026; use the corrected 13 August 2026 CSV under /wp-content/uploads/2026/08/ | CSV, commented header | Probate cost model, filing fees, and small-estate limits, all 50 states + D.C. |
GET /data/state-tax-2026.csv | CSV, commented header | State taxation of retirement income, Social Security, pensions, estate and inheritance tax, all 50 states + D.C. |
Each file’s first two lines are #-prefixed comments stating the source and
retrieval date — strip lines starting with # before parsing if your CSV
reader doesn’t handle comments. All three are UTF-8, comma-delimited, RFC 4180 quoting.
Field dictionaries
advisor-statistics-2026.csv
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
state_code | Two-letter state/D.C. postal code |
firm_count | Count of SEC-registered advisers headquartered in the state |
rank_by_firm_count | State’s rank by firm count, 1 = most firms |
total_regulatory_aum_usd | Sum of regulatory assets under management, Form ADV Item 5.F.(2)(c) |
rank_by_aum | State’s rank by total regulatory AUM |
median_firm_raum_usd | Median firm-level regulatory AUM in the state |
firms_under_100m | Count of firms with regulatory AUM under $100M |
firms_100m_to_1b | Count of firms with regulatory AUM $100M–$1B |
firms_1b_to_10b | Count of firms with regulatory AUM $1B–$10B |
firms_over_10b | Count of firms with regulatory AUM over $10B |
estate-probate-2026.csv
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
state | State or D.C. name |
probate_fee_model | How the state’s probate fee is structured (statutory percentage, reasonable fee, flat, etc.) |
fee_basis | What value the fee is calculated against |
filing_fee | The court filing fee to open a probate estate |
small_estate_limit | Dollar threshold for the state’s small-estate/simplified procedure, and whether it reaches real property |
statutes | Statute citations backing the row |
confidence | Verification confidence for the row (high/medium/low, per the honest-gap convention) |
state-tax-2026.csv
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
state | State or D.C. name |
income_tax | State income tax treatment |
social_security | State tax treatment of Social Security benefits |
pension_401k_ira_treatment | State tax treatment of pension, 401(k), and IRA income |
military_note | State-specific military retirement tax notes |
estate_tax | Whether and how the state taxes estates |
inheritance_tax | Whether and how the state taxes inheritances |
statute_cites | Statute citations backing the row |
confidence | Verification confidence for the row |
License and versioning
All three endpoints are CC BY 4.0 — reuse, republish, and adapt freely,
including commercially, with attribution and a link back. Each file is versioned by its edition
year in the filename (the “2026” in state-tax-2026.csv); a new edition ships as a
new filename rather than silently rewriting the old one, so a URL you’ve already fetched won’t
change contents underneath you. The comment header in each file states the retrieval/compilation
date — check it before assuming a cached copy is current.
Deposited copies and permanent DOIs
Point-in-time snapshots of these and other Clear Money Guide datasets are deposited on Zenodo with permanent DOIs — useful if you need a citable, immutable version rather than the live, periodically-refreshed endpoint. The full registry (15+ datasets as of this page’s last update) is indexed at the research library; three of the most-cited:
- 2026 Advisor Fee Benchmark — 10.5281/zenodo.21741167 (v1.1 adds the per-firm cost file: 10.5281/zenodo.21762538)
- Probate Cost & Small-Estate Limits — 10.5281/zenodo.21744062
- Advisor Statistics by State — 10.5281/zenodo.21741639
Source code
The calculator engines and embeddable widgets that consume this data are open source on GitHub: clearmoneyguide/calculators and clearmoneyguide/embeds (both MIT-licensed), also deposited at DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21879865.
Rate limits and etiquette
No API key and no enforced rate limit — this is the same static-file hosting that serves the rest of the site. If you’re polling on a schedule, once a day is more than enough (these files change on an annual or occasional edition cycle, not in real time); cache the response and respect the header comment’s retrieval date rather than re-fetching on every page load.
Questions
Methodology questions, corrections, or a use case that needs a field this page doesn’t cover: [email protected].
Free to reuse with attribution under CC BY 4.0. Librarians, educators, and journalists: this table is CC BY 4.0 — reuse with attribution is welcome, and we answer methodology questions at contact@.