PCS Move

Methodology

How every rate on this site is sourced, verified, and updated — and the editorial rules that govern what does and does not get published.

Editor and curator

Guilherme Correia

Active-duty U.S. Air Force member stationed at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Husband and father. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt. Final-year Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering candidate at Arizona State University. Founder of Correia Virtus LLC, the parent company that operates Military Toolkit, BudgetPilot, and DividendPilot.

Military Toolkit is independently operated and is not endorsed by, sponsored by, or affiliated with the Department of Defense, the Department of the Air Force, the U.S. Space Force, DFAS, DTMO, the Veterans Affairs administration, or any other federal agency. Editorial decisions are made by the curator above and do not represent the views of the U.S. government.

Why this page exists

Military families act on the numbers that appear on this site. A PPM profit estimate determines whether a family rents a truck or accepts a government move. A DLA expectation shapes a deposit on a new house. A TSP projection influences whether someone reenlists into BRS or stays the legacy course. The accuracy of those numbers and the honesty of the editorial process behind them is the only durable value Military Toolkit can offer. This page documents how the numbers are sourced, verified, updated, and corrected — so that a reader who wants to challenge a published value knows exactly where to push, and so that the editorial record is auditable.

Authoritative source hierarchy

Every numeric value on the site traces to a published authority in the following priority order. When two sources disagree, the higher-priority source governs.

  1. U.S. Code (statute). The originating statute for every entitlement — 10 USC for active duty pay and retirement; 26 USC for tax treatment; 37 USC for travel allowances; 38 USC for VA benefits; 50 USC for SCRA and MSRRA. Statute is the constitutional source; everything below implements it.
  2. Public Law (NDAA and related). Annual National Defense Authorization Acts modify statute and set pay raise percentages, BAH rate-protection rules, and program eligibility. Recent NDAAs cited site-wide include FY26 (basic pay raise; FSA increase to $300/month), FY23 (BAH restored to 100% surveyed amount), FY16 (BRS authorization, Public Law 114-92).
  3. DoD Financial Management Regulation (FMR). The DoD-level implementing regulation for pay and allowances. Volume 7A covers active-duty pay and allowances; Volume 7B covers retirement; Volume 16 covers debt management. The FMR is the authoritative implementation of statute and binds every service.
  4. DoD Instruction (DoDI). Topic-specific DoD-level instructions, e.g., DoDI 1304.31 (Enlistment, Accession, and Retention Bonuses), DoDI 1315.19 (EFMP), DoDI 1322.25 (Voluntary Education).
  5. Joint Travel Regulations (JTR). The single source for PCS and TDY travel — DLA, MALT, TLE, per diem, weight allowances, PPM. The JTR is jointly maintained by the Per Diem, Travel, and Transportation Allowance Committee (PDTATAC) and is updated continuously through MAP memorandums.
  6. DFAS pay tables. The actual rate tables — basic pay, BAS, special and incentive pay — published by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service after each annual NDAA. Tables are reproduced from the DFAS published version, not paraphrased.
  7. DTMO publications. The Defense Travel Management Office publishes BAH (annually), OHA (rank-and-rent-tier ceilings, updated quarterly), CONUS COLA (high-cost MHA supplement), and per diem rates (CONUS standard + non-standard localities, OCONUS by host country). DTMO rate lookup is the canonical source for location-keyed entitlements.
  8. VA publications. VA disability compensation rates, GI Bill BAH, MAPR for VA pension, VA Home Loan funding fee schedule. The VA.gov rate tables are updated as VA cost-of-living adjustments process.
  9. IRS publications. IRS Publication 3 (Armed Forces Tax Guide), Publication 15-T (federal withholding tables), Publication 521 (Moving Expenses), Revenue Procedures (annual contribution limits). The IRS publication is the authority for federal tax treatment of military pay items.
  10. Service-specific regulations. AFI 36 series (Air Force / Space Force), AR series (Army), MCO series (Marine Corps), OPNAVINST and NAVPERS (Navy), CIM series (Coast Guard). Service regs implement the higher-priority sources for in-service procedures (promotion timing, fitness scoring, MOS classification).

Update cadence

The military pay year aligns with the federal calendar year, not the federal fiscal year. Most rates change on 1 January each year following the prior December's NDAA enactment. A second update window in October aligns with the fiscal year start for selected entitlements. The site refresh schedule mirrors this rhythm.

  • January refresh (within 14 days of effective date). Basic pay table, BAS, BAH (DTMO published mid-December), DLA, MALT, per diem standard CONUS, special and incentive pay rates, TSP contribution limits, federal tax brackets, state tax brackets, BRS lump-sum discount rate, OHA initial CY rates.
  • October refresh (within 14 days of fiscal year start). GSA per diem CONUS non-standard locality rates, certain VA rates effective October, OCONUS COLA index updates.
  • Continuous (within the week of publication). JTR MAP memorandums, DoDI updates, NDAA signing events (typically late December), DTMO OCONUS per diem (monthly), VA cost-of-living adjustments.
  • Quarterly audit cycle. Every 90 days, all numeric values across the site are compared to the current authoritative source. Discrepancies are corrected and logged in the git history with a citation to the new authority and a reference to the prior value.

Error-correction process

If a published value on Military Toolkit is incorrect, the correction process is the following:

  1. A reader (or the editor) identifies the discrepancy and emails support@correiavirtus.com with the page, the value, the value that should be there, and the source citation that establishes the correct value.
  2. The editor verifies the citation against the authority. If the citation is verified, the correction is committed to the underlying JSON data file or page source in the public GitHub repository at github.com/correiaus/pcs-toolkit, with a commit message that references the page, the prior value, the corrected value, and the authority.
  3. The corrected value is deployed to the live site within 24 hours of verification. Railway's continuous deployment pipeline rebuilds the site on the new commit; the new value typically goes live in under 10 minutes after the commit is merged.
  4. The corrected page's HTTP Last-Modified header updates automatically. Search engines re-index the page on their next crawl, propagating the correction to search results within 1-3 days.
  5. Substantive corrections (entitlement amounts, statutory citations, eligibility rules) are noted in the page's regulatory reference footer with the effective date.

No correction is private. The git history is public, the commit message is public, and the corrected value is accessible to any reader who reviewed the prior version. This is the audit trail.

What this site will not do

  • Fabricate testimonials, reviews, user counts, or attributed quotes. If the testimonials section is empty, it is because Military Toolkit has not yet received quotable feedback from real readers. Fake quotes from stock-photo avatars are recognizable to military spouse groups and would destroy the only thing this site can offer.
  • Publish rates without an authoritative source. If a rate cannot be traced to one of the sources in the hierarchy above, it is not published. The editorial rule is: if a value is missing or in dispute, ask rather than guess.
  • Use AI to generate rates, formulas, or statutory citations. The AI Assistant at /assistant uses Anthropic's Claude with embedded copies of authoritative reference data and is instructed to refuse questions that fall outside that data. The rest of the site's content is human-authored editorial commentary built on the source hierarchy above.
  • Scrape, copy, or republish content from other publishers. The numeric data in lookup tables (BAH, OHA, per diem, base pay) is reproduced from the originating DoD publication, not from intermediary publishers. Where prior versions of pages cited third-party compilers, those citations have been corrected.
  • Charge for access. Every calculator and reference page is and will remain free. There is no premium tier, no account requirement, no email capture, and no paywall. Operating expenses (Railway hosting, domain registration, AI API costs for the Assistant) are covered by Correia Virtus LLC and, prospectively, by Google AdSense on approval.
  • Provide individual finance, legal, tax, or investment advice. The calculators are math tools that compute against published regulations. For binding decisions on individual cases, the installation finance office, Staff Judge Advocate, DFAS, or a licensed professional in the relevant field is the right resource.

Why a real byline matters

Anonymous calculator sites proliferate. Most of them are accurate enough to qualify; some are AI-generated content farms; a few are deliberately misleading. The military-finance space is small and the families relying on it have limited time to triage what they read. Putting a real name and a real life behind the editorial work is the simplest way to be accountable to that audience. If a number on this site is wrong, the corrective email goes to a real person who has lived the moves these calculators model. If a regulation changes and the site falls behind, the same person is responsible for catching it.

That accountability is the reason this page exists. The site stands or falls on whether the math is right and the sources are honest. Both are auditable. Both are mine to keep correct.

— Guilherme Correia, editor and curator. Reach the editorial address at support@correiavirtus.com. The site source code is public at github.com/correiaus/pcs-toolkit.

Related editorial resources

  • About Military Toolkit — origin story, mission, and operating principles.
  • Contact — how to report a data error or suggest a tool.
  • Privacy Policy — what data the site collects, what it does not, and consent management.
  • Terms of Service — usage terms, disclaimer of warranties, governing law.
  • All tools — the complete catalog by category.

Correia Virtus LLC — Editor: Guilherme Correia · Source code: github.com/correiaus/pcs-toolkit

Results are estimates. Always verify with your finance office.