How these guides are made

Nothing on this site is written directly into a page. Every state is a structured record — 38 of them — holding its statutory residency test, domicile factors, audit program, filing forms, sticky rules, and official resources, each field carrying the primary source it came from. The pages are rendered from those records, which is why a figure cannot appear on a guide without a source attached to it.

The same 38 records generate 167 pages: 25 departure guides, 106 corridor guides, and an arrival guide for each destination state. They also feed the residency calculator. One record, every surface — so a correction lands everywhere at once rather than in the one place someone remembered to edit.

Across those records there are 299 links to official sources — statutes, regulations, department publications, and the forms themselves. The guides link out generously on purpose.

A primary source is the text of a statute or regulation, a revenue department’s own publication or guidance, or an official form. Secondary commentary — law-firm articles, other guides, news write-ups — is not used as the basis for a stated rule. Where a state publishes its own residency manual or audit guidelines, that is what the page cites.

Every guide carries a section listing those sources as a first-class block rather than a footer, and every rule card links to the source behind that specific rule. The intent is that a reader can leave for the statute at any point and check the page against it.

Two gates run on every build, and both fail the build rather than warn when the problem is a hard one.

The data gate parses every record against a schema that requires a source on sourced facts, scans every string field against a language denylist, checks freshness against the review date, and verifies that every corridor names two states that actually exist in the roster with the right roles. A record that fails does not render.

The rendered gate scans the built HTML — not just the data — for the same denylisted language, because template copy, headings, and calls to action can introduce a claim the records never made. It also measures how much text sibling corridor guides share, so pages out of the same state cannot quietly become near-duplicates of each other.

Nine patterns are blocked in both the records and the rendered page. They cover the vocabulary of certainty — the adjectives that tell a reader a position cannot be challenged, the verbs that promise a result, the claims that an examination can be headed off — together with prescriptive second-person instructions in rule content. The list is not reproduced here, because the scanner reads this page too and does not distinguish naming a phrase from making one.

The reason is the category. Most writing about state residency is marketing for a service, and it sells certainty that no one can supply — whether a move holds up is decided by a state examiner looking at a specific record, not by an article. These guides describe what states evaluate and what their rules say. They do not advise, and they do not predict outcomes.

The list is written as patterns rather than plain words so that genuine legal terms survive. New York’s statutory 548-day harbour provision is a real rule with a real name, and the pattern is shaped to let it through while still catching the promotional use of the same word.

Every guide shows the edition, the date the record behind it was last reviewed, and the reviewer, directly under the heading rather than buried at the foot. The most recent review across the roster is 2026-07-25. A record that goes stale is flagged by the data gate.

Reviews are currently attributed to DomusDay Research — the editorial process described on this page. No individual credential is claimed, and none should be inferred: nobody named on this site holds themselves out as a CPA, an attorney, or an enrolled agent. If that changes, the reviewer line will name the person and the credential rather than leaving it to be assumed.

It is not advice. The guides describe rules; they do not apply them to a particular situation, and residency turns almost entirely on particular facts. A reader with real money at stake should be working with someone who can look at those facts.

It is not complete. 25 states have a departure guide, which means most do not yet. Where a state is missing, the site says so rather than generating a page from nothing.

It is not the statute. Rules change, sometimes mid-year, and the official source linked on every page governs over anything written here. Where a figure has not been verified against its primary source, the line is left out and said to be left out rather than estimated.

Corrections are welcome and are made against the record, so they propagate to every page derived from it. The general explanation of how residency works lives on the state tax residency pillar.