Most of what this site computes is a published rate applied by a written rule: Dislocation Allowance is a table lookup, MALT is a distance times a rate, travel per diem is a flat rate times authorized days times a percentage from a JTR table, and TLE and TLA are percentages of locality rates. Those are exactly checkable, and the source tables are committed to this project rather than hand-typed. Exactly one figure is a model — the Government Constructed Cost that sets the PPM incentive, which pays 100% of it.
Rates last verified August 2026 against the published source tables.
The constructed cost model is weight times distance times a rate, plus a fixed component, and it was calibrated on a single observed PPM. One point does not determine a curve, and the real cost is not a straight line: the JTR's own Best Value components include a short-haul charge for shipments moving 800 or fewer miles that this model has no term for. So the estimate reads low on short moves, and that error is systematic rather than random — it does not average out, and it is worst exactly where a PPM is most often worth doing.
The range shown around the estimate is a declared judgement rather than a measured confidence interval, because calibrating one honestly would need the distribution of real constructed-cost quotes and that is precisely what is not public. For an individual move the honest answer is MilMove, which produces the real figure; this estimate is for deciding whether a PPM is worth pursuing and for sanity-checking what you are offered.
Published rates are kept current differently. Rate tables are committed as the publisher's own files and the code is generated from them, so a rate that cannot be resolved from a source file stops the build rather than falling back to an average. Each family carries the date it was last checked against its source, and every page shows the oldest such date among the figures it uses, because a page is only as current as its stalest number. Where two official documents disagree, both are kept and the disagreement is stated.