Editorial policy
How Salary-Calculator.in sources, dates, reviews and corrects every pay, allowance, pension and tax figure it publishes, and how advertising is kept out of editorial.
This editorial policy states the standard every page on Salary-Calculator.in is written to. It covers which sources are acceptable, how figures are dated, how drafts are reviewed, how errors are corrected, and how advertising is kept out of editorial decisions. It applies to the reference articles and to the calculators alike.
The subject matter is consequential. A reader deciding whether to commute a portion of pension, or estimating a tax liability before choosing a regime, is acting on the numbers. The standard below is set accordingly.
Source hierarchy
A claim on this site is acceptable only if it traces to a primary document. In descending order of authority, those are the governing statute or gazette notification, the statutory rules made under it, the executive order that implements or clarifies them, and the Pay Commission report that recommended them.
For central government pay and allowances that means the CCS (Revised Pay) Rules 2016, the Department of Expenditure and DoPT Office Memoranda issued under them, and the relevant Pay Commission report. For pension it means the CCS (Pension) Rules 2021, the DoPPW orders issued under them, and the PFRDA regulations where the National Pension System or the Unified Pension Scheme applies. For tax it means the Income-tax Act, the Finance Act of the relevant year, and CBDT notifications and circulars.
A citation names the document precisely enough to be retrieved: an Office Memorandum by its full file number and date, a rule by its number and the gazette notification date, an Act by section, a Pay Commission report by chapter or paragraph. A reference to “a recent order” or “the pension rules” is not a citation and does not survive review.
Sources that are not used
Salary and tax aggregators, coaching portals, employee-forum threads, SEO farms, personal blogs, social media and Wikipedia are not cited. Where one of them is correct, it is correct because it is repeating a primary order, and that order is cited instead.
Recognised Indian press archives, including Mint, The Hindu, the Economic Times and Business Standard, are used for context and chronology only. A press report never establishes a rate, a rule or an entitlement on this site. Where a widely reported figure has not yet been given effect by an order, the page says so and names what is still outstanding.
Dating and freshness
A figure is published with the date it took effect and the order that gave it effect, not as a bare current value. “Dearness allowance is 60 per cent” is not publishable; “dearness allowance was raised to 60 per cent of basic pay with effect from 1 January 2026 by Department of Expenditure OM 1/1(i)/2026-E.II(B) dated 22 April 2026” is.
Rates that move on a known cycle are held in a single machine-readable data file and rendered into every page and calculator that uses them, so one update reaches the whole site at once and no page can drift from another. Dearness allowance is the main case, and it is revised twice a year with effect from 1 January and 1 July.
Every page carries a visible “Updated” date, which is changed whenever the content is substantively edited. The dated figures in the high-traffic clusters, meaning the current dearness allowance rate, the income-tax slabs and standard deduction, and the pension and gratuity ceilings, are reviewed each time the governing authority issues an order affecting them. A stale figure is treated as an error, not as an acceptable lag.
Drafting, review and accountability
Pages on this site are researched and drafted with the assistance of AI language models, and are then checked against the primary sources before publication. The check is the part that matters: every load-bearing figure, date, file number and rule reference is verified against the governing document, and a claim that cannot be verified is deleted rather than softened or hedged.
Where verification shows that an already published page states something incorrect, that page is corrected in the same pass rather than left to be dealt with later. Correcting a live error takes priority over publishing anything new.
Salary-Calculator.in is accountable for the accuracy of what it publishes regardless of how a draft was produced. Machine assistance is disclosed here rather than concealed, because a reader is entitled to weigh it.
Corrections
A correction request that names the page and the governing order is acted on. Where the report is right, the page is amended and its “Updated” date is changed, so a reader can see that the page has moved. Where a correction changes a figure a reader may have relied on, the page states what changed and from what date, rather than replacing the old figure silently.
Where a report is not accompanied by a primary source, the claim is checked against the governing document before anything is changed. A page is not amended because a claim is asserted confidently or repeated widely.
What a useful report contains, and the address for sending one when it is in service, are on the contact page.
Independence from advertising
The site carries Google AdSense display advertising and no other commercial arrangement. There are no affiliate links, no referral links, no sponsored content and no paid placements in editorial anywhere on the site.
No advertiser sees a page before publication, requests a page, or influences what a page says. Advertising does not determine which topics are covered, in what order, or in what light. Advertisements are placed programmatically, are kept visually distinct from the content, and are never styled or positioned to read as an article, a citation, a calculator result or an internal link. No advertising is carried on stub pages, on the search page, or on the policy pages.
Should the funding model ever change, this section is revised before the change takes effect.
Stub pages
Where an article links to a topic that has not been written, a short placeholder is published so the link resolves to a real page rather than an error. A placeholder is labelled as such on the page, is excluded from search-engine indexing and from the sitemap, and carries no advertising. It is replaced by a full article when one is written. A placeholder makes no factual claims beyond naming what the eventual article will cover.