About TallyClose

Buying or selling a home comes with a pile of costs that no one explains clearly until the very end — transfer tax, title insurance, recording fees, lender fees, prepaids. By the time you see the final figure on a settlement statement, it's too late to plan. TallyClose brings those numbers forward, so you can estimate your closing costs (or your net proceeds, if you're selling) before you sign anything.

What makes us different

• Every rate is cited. We tie each transfer-tax rate, recording fee, and title method to its official source, with the date we verified it. Figures we haven't verified yet are clearly flagged and kept out of search.
• County-level depth. Closing costs change at the county and city level — a fact most national calculators ignore. We go deeper, with county recording-fee schedules and local transfer taxes where we can verify them.
• A real seller tool. Most calculators only serve buyers. Our seller net-proceeds sheet shows what you actually keep, and lets you download a clean PDF.
• Genuinely neutral. We don't sell mortgages, take applications, or collect your information. When we link to a partner it's clearly labeled, flat-fee, and never reorders our numbers.

Our methodology

The valuable part of a closing-cost estimate isn't the arithmetic — anyone can multiply a price by a percentage. It's the underlying legal facts: each state's transfer-tax rate, who customarily pays it, the county recording-fee structure, and whether title premiums are state-set or negotiable. Those are statutes and official schedules, so we treat them as primary sources rather than guesses.

• Transfer tax & who pays come from each state's Department of Revenue / taxation authority and the underlying statute, cross-checked against established industry references.
• County & city transfer taxes and recording fees come from the county Recorder / Register of Deeds and city tax authorities — including the cities (New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and others) that levy their own.
• Title-insurance method comes from each state's insurance department: whether premiums are promulgated (state-set), filed, or negotiable.
• Lender fees, appraisal, inspection and insurance are national averages, presented honestly as estimated ranges — they are not state-specific legal facts.
• The moving-cost estimator is a deliberately conservative national-range heuristic: it scales typical professional-mover pricing by home size and distance to produce a low–high band, not a binding quote. It does not know your specific carrier, season, stairs, or access, so we present a range and label it an estimate — your actual quote should come from licensed movers.

For the full, line-by-line breakdown of where each figure comes from and how often we re-review it, see our methodology & data sources page.

How we verify — and the data gate

Authority on a money topic isn't a tone of voice; it's traceability. So every record in our dataset carries three things: the governing statute or official citation, a direct link to the official source (almost always a state revenue department, county recorder, or insurance department on a .gov domain), and the date we last verified it against that source. You can see those citations on each state and county page — and the whole source-verified dataset is free to download and reuse with attribution at our data & downloads page.

That provenance drives a hard rule we built into the build itself — our data gate:

• Source-verified records show a green badge with the citation, the official link, and the verification date. These pages are indexable and appear in our sitemap.
• Estimated records — figures we have not yet confirmed against the official source — show an amber "not yet source-verified" badge, and the page is set to noindex and excluded from the sitemap automatically. An unverified rate can never be presented to a search engine, or an AI engine, as authoritative. The tool still works for you; it just tells you honestly that the number is an estimate.

As of June 2026, 45 states are source-verified and 6 are still estimates being verified on a rolling basis, across 174 counties covered at the county level. Anyone can audit our work: open any verified state page and follow the source link straight to the statute or official schedule it rests on.

Editorial standards & corrections

TallyClose is built and maintained by an independent editorial team focused on real-estate transaction costs. We are deliberately a single, accountable brand rather than a network of look-alike sites — that's how trust in a money topic is supposed to work. We do not name fictional "experts": our authority comes from the citations you can check, not from credentials we'd ask you to take on faith.

• Independent of lenders. We are not a lender, mortgage broker, title company, or law firm. We don't originate loans, take applications, or sell your information, and no advertiser or affiliate can pay to change a rate, a ranking, or the order partners appear in. See how we make money.
• Estimates, not advice. Every tool says so on the page; the authoritative numbers always come from your lender, your title company, the county recorder, or a licensed professional in your state.
• Reviewed on a schedule. We re-review the dataset at least annually and monitor known rate changes in between; any figure older than 18 months is automatically flagged as possibly outdated. This dataset was last reviewed June 2026.
• Corrections welcome. If a rate looks wrong, tell us. Email hello@tallyclose.com with the state or county and, ideally, the official source — we check it against the citation and fix verified data promptly, updating the verification date when we do.