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Editorial Policy and Methodology

This page states how Ready to Serve chooses, checks and corrects what it publishes. It applies to every article, guide, dataset table and department record on readytoserve.io. Last revised September 8, 2026.

1. Sources

  • Primary documents only. Pay figures, requirements, dates and process steps come from documents the employer or the governing body published: pay plans and salary schedules, collective bargaining agreements and memoranda of understanding, civil service rules and exam notices, job bulletins on the employer's own applicant system, city and department FAQs, annual reports and council items. Federal figures come from the agency that produces them (for wages, the Bureau of Labor Statistics; for the fire department universe, the U.S. Fire Administration's National Fire Department Registry).
  • Not sources. Aggregator salary sites, job boards' estimates, forum posts, news paraphrases of a contract, and anything a recruiter or employee says in private. A news report may point us to a document; the document is what gets cited.
  • Live reads. Every source is read at its live location on the date printed with it. Cached copies and third-party mirrors are not used in place of the live document.

2. Figures

  • Print what the document prints. A starting salary on this site is the figure the document names for that step or title, in the unit the document uses. Hourly and monthly rates are recorded as hourly and monthly rates; they are not multiplied into annual salaries the employer never printed.
  • Truncate, never round up. A figure printed to the cent stays to the cent. Nothing is rounded upward to a cleaner number.
  • Null is a value. Where the document prints no figure, the cell is blank and a note explains why: hourly only, monthly only, expired agreement, or a file that would not open.
  • Conflicts are named, not averaged. When two documents from the same employer disagree, both figures are printed with their sources and the page says they disagree. No average, midpoint or preference is asserted unless one document plainly supersedes the other, in which case the page says which and why.
  • No derived counts. Percentages published as percentages are not turned into head counts; totals from different series are not added together.
  • Base pay is base pay. Paramedic, specialty, longevity and education premiums are reported separately from base salary and labeled.

3. Dates

  • Every dataset page and candidate guide carries a "last verified" date. Every department row carries the effective date or fiscal year of its document where the document prints one, and the date it was read.
  • A schedule from a prior year is labeled as such and marked partial. It is never presented as a current start.
  • A figure that a department later withdraws or corrects is described as withdrawn, with the date; the withdrawn number is not reprinted in the sentence that retracts it.

4. Independence

  • No department, agency, union or vendor reviews, approves or pays for a guide. Ready to Serve's paid products for agencies are separate from editorial pages and never change a published figure.
  • Pages that host a department's own recruiting material say so, and the guides beside them are labeled as site-hosted guides rather than department publications. The site does not imply a department's endorsement, insider access, or a relationship that does not exist.
  • Nothing a candidate sends the desk in private, and nothing a recruiter says outside a published document, appears on the site. Candidates' names and contact details are never recorded in published material.

5. Production and checks

  • Pages are produced by the Ready to Serve editorial desk with software that reads the cited documents and checks every published figure against them before and after publication. Automated checks refuse a page that asserts more than its record supports, that reprints a withdrawn figure, or that carries a quality claim the sources do not carry.
  • Public routes, dataset schemas and department records are tested after every content change, and the live page is read back after each deployment.

6. Attribution

  • Articles are attributed to the Ready to Serve Editorial desk as an organization. The site does not byline individuals and does not assert credentials for people who are not named. If a named specialist reviews a page in future, the page will state who reviewed it and what was verified.

7. Corrections

  • To report an error, write to support@readytoserve.io with the page URL, the figure in question and the document that contradicts it.
  • Corrections are made on the page itself, with the date of the change, and the page's "last verified" date is updated when the correction has been checked against the live source.
  • A department that believes its figures are out of date may send the current document; the page will be re-read against it and updated with the new read date. No payment is involved in either direction.

8. What this policy does not do

  • It does not make Ready to Serve a recruiting authority for any department. Eligibility, exams, offers and hiring decisions belong to the employer and its civil service body.
  • It does not guarantee that a figure is the one a candidate will be offered. It guarantees that the figure is the one the cited document printed on the day it was read, and that the page says when that is not enough.

Questions about this policy: support@readytoserve.io. See also About Ready to Serve, the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy.