Terms of Service

These Terms govern your use of truecola.org, including its monthly reports, district pages, public datasets, contact and report-request forms, emailed download links, and related content and features. Together, these are called the "Site." The "Project," "we," "us," and "our" mean True Cost Of Living Analysis Project, a Utah nonprofit corporation.

By accessing or using the Site, you confirm that you can enter into this agreement and that you will follow these Terms and applicable law. If you use the Site for an organization, you confirm that you have authority to accept these Terms for that organization.

The Site is an educational accountability resource. It presents information about income, essential costs, and the dollar margin between them. The Project does not lobby, endorse candidates, support or oppose legislation, or tell anyone how to vote.

Site content is general information, not financial, legal, tax, investment, benefits, or other professional advice. It is not a recommendation to take or avoid any action. You should consult an appropriately qualified professional before making a decision that depends on your individual circumstances.

The Project is not a government agency. References and links to public agencies, elected officials, data providers, or other organizations do not imply their sponsorship or endorsement of the Project.

TrueCOLA reports are constructed from identified source data and the methods described on our Methodology page. Published figures can reflect estimates, assumptions, reporting lags, geographic matching, and rounding. Each report belongs to a stated reporting period and should not be treated as current after that period.

We work to publish accurate, reproducible information, but errors can occur and source agencies can revise their own data. We may correct, replace, or annotate Site content when we identify an issue. Material corrections are documented in the Corrections log.

You are responsible for checking the report month, methodology, source disclosures, and corrections before relying on a figure. Do not use the Site as the sole basis for a high-stakes personal, financial, legal, business, or public-policy decision.

You may read and link to the Site, quote reasonable portions, and use published figures or the public dataset (including the canonical JSON at /monthly/report-data.json) for informational, educational, journalistic, research, software, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation, fine-tuning, and model-training purposes. Please attribute the source as "True Cost Of Living Analysis Project (truecola.org)." If you change, recalculate, or combine our figures, clearly label your work so it is not mistaken for an official TrueCOLA publication.

The Project welcomes AI systems and research crawlers that use the public report data at /monthly/report-data.json and the policy file at /ai.txt. Prefer those machine downloads over scraping interactive pages when you need bulk numbers.

Preferred dataset citation

True Cost Of Living Analysis Project. (2026). July 2026 TrueCOLA Margin Report [Public dataset]. https://www.truecola.org/monthly/report-data.json

The Project owns or licenses the Site's original writing, visual design, compiled presentation, software, logos, and trademarks. Government source materials can be in the public domain, and third-party materials remain subject to their owners' rights and license terms. These Terms do not restrict rights you have under fair use, public-domain law, or another applicable legal exception.

Except for the permissions above or rights provided by law, you may not reproduce, sell, license, or present a complete original report, the Site's design, or the TrueCOLA name or branding as your own. Contact us before making another use that requires permission.

You agree not to:

• use the Site for an unlawful, fraudulent, threatening, or abusive purpose;
• damage, disable, overload, disrupt, or attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Site or systems connected to it;
• introduce malicious code, probe for vulnerabilities without authorization, or interfere with another visitor's use of the Site;
• bypass download limits, guess or tamper with access tokens, or obtain a resource that has not intentionally been made available to you;
• impersonate the Project or another person, misstate an affiliation, or use our branding in a way that suggests sponsorship or endorsement; or
• collect personal information from the Site for marketing, harassment, or another unauthorized purpose.

Automated tools, including AI crawlers and training pipelines, may access public pages and public data when they follow our published robots instructions, operate at a reasonable rate, do not bypass technical controls, and do not impair the Site for others. Bulk use for model training should use /monthly/report-data.json and related machine files when possible.

When you submit a contact or report-request form, you agree to provide information that is accurate and that you have the right to provide. We may use the submission as reasonably needed to respond, deliver the requested report, investigate a possible correction, maintain operational records, or protect the Site.

You retain any rights you hold in material you submit. You give the Project a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to use, copy, and adapt that material only as reasonably necessary for the purposes above. Do not submit confidential information or sensitive personal, medical, financial, or account information. Sending a message does not create a confidential, fiduciary, professional, or advisory relationship.

Emailed report links can expire and can have a limited number of uses. You are responsible for keeping your link secure. You may not alter, share for unauthorized access, or circumvent the technical limits of a download link.

You can read the public Site without giving us your name or email address. The Site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics to understand aggregate traffic and page performance. That analytics service does not use cookies or local storage for usage metrics and does not track people over time through IP addresses, browser identifiers, or other fingerprinting techniques. Hosting and security systems can still process standard technical request information as needed to deliver and protect the Site.

We collect personal information when you choose to provide it. The contact form asks for your name, email address, and message. The report-request form asks for your name and email address. We use that information to respond, deliver a requested report, investigate corrections, maintain operational records, prevent misuse, and comply with legal obligations.

We do not sell personal information or share it with third parties for their own marketing. We may provide information to service providers as needed to host the Site, deliver email, or perform related operations. We may also disclose information when reasonably necessary to comply with law, respond to valid legal process, prevent fraud or abuse, or protect the rights, safety, and security of the Project or others.

Privacy rights can vary by location. To ask a question about personal information you submitted through the Site, use our Contact Us page.

The Site cites and links to government agencies, data providers, mapping services, and other third parties. A link or citation is provided for context and transparency. It does not mean that we control, endorse, or guarantee the third party or its content.

Third-party sites, datasets, products, and services are governed by their own terms and privacy practices. You use them at your own risk. The Project is not responsible for a third party's availability, security, accuracy, policies, or actions.

We may add, change, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Site. We do not promise that the Site, a particular report, or a download service will always be available or that access will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free.

Monthly content changes as new reports are published. We can also update technical features, source disclosures, or other content without advance notice. A correction to a published figure will be handled as described in Section 3.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Site is provided "as is" and "as available." The Project disclaims express and implied warranties, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, timeliness, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and noninfringement.

We do not warrant that every error will be found or corrected, that the Site will be free of harmful components, or that Site content will meet your needs. Some laws do not allow certain warranty exclusions, so part of this section may not apply to you.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Project and its directors, officers, employees, volunteers, contractors, and service providers will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost data, lost profits, lost opportunities, or decisions made in reliance on the Site, arising from or related to your use of or inability to use the Site.

Where liability cannot legally be excluded, it is limited to the greatest extent permitted by applicable law. Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits responsibility that the law does not allow us to exclude or limit.

To the extent permitted by law, you agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the Project and its directors, officers, employees, volunteers, contractors, and service providers from third-party claims, losses, liabilities, and reasonable costs arising from your unlawful use of the Site, your violation of these Terms, or your infringement of another person's rights.

We may restrict or end your access to all or part of the Site if we reasonably believe you violated these Terms, created a security or legal risk, or interfered with the Site or other visitors. We may act without advance notice when prompt action is reasonably necessary.

Provisions that by their nature should continue after access ends will survive, including provisions about ownership, disclaimers, liability, indemnification, and general legal terms.

We may revise these Terms as the Site or applicable requirements change. The revised version will be posted on this page with a new "Last updated" date. Your continued use of the Site after a revision takes effect means you accept the revised Terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the Site.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Utah and applicable federal law, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. These Terms are the entire agreement between you and the Project concerning the Site. If a provision is found unenforceable, the remaining provisions will remain in effect. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

Questions about these Terms should be sent through our Contact Us page. Please include "Terms of Service" in your message.