About Practical Atlas

What this site is for

Practical Atlas answers the money, home, and safety questions U.S. households look up when something changes or stops making sense: a tax rule that is new this year, an electric bill that jumped, a heater or water heater that is not doing its job, a text message that might be a scam. Each page does three things in order. It gives the short answer, shows how to check that answer against your own situation (often with a calculator that shows its arithmetic), and says what to do next, including when the next step belongs to the IRS, your utility, your bank, or a licensed professional.

Who publishes it

Practical Atlas is published by Eigenlabs, which is responsible for every page, calculator, and correction on this site.

Corrections, privacy questions, and anything else: contact@practicalatlas.net.

There are no user accounts, comments, or community edits. Nothing on the site is written by a contributor we cannot name, and nothing is published on someone else’s behalf.

What it covers

Money and taxes: the federal tax changes for 2025 and 2026, retirement and health-account limits, Social Security, credit reports and scores, mortgages and loans, and the everyday arithmetic of pay and prices. Home Systems: heating and cooling, electricity and the bill that comes with it, water heaters and plumbing, appliances, and the alarms and breakers that keep a house safe. Consumer Tech: Wi-Fi, backups, phones, printers, and computers, and how the common scams that reach a household work. The calculators put your own numbers into the formulas those guides explain.

It does not offer medical, legal, insurance, or investment advice, and it does not review products or claim hands-on tests it has not done. In October 2026 the site retired its photography and AI-workflow sections and its health and school calculators so that every page belongs to the same subject; their old addresses redirect to the nearest page that still exists.

How a page is made

1. A topic is chosen because readers search for it and an official source answers it, often because a rule or a figure changed this year.
2. The source that governs the answer is opened and read: the IRS form instructions or publication, the Social Security Administration’s announcement, the Energy Information Administration’s table, the CPSC or Department of Energy guidance, or the manufacturer’s own support page. If a source cannot be opened and confirmed, the claim it would have supported is left out.
3. The draft, which is AI-assisted (see the AI use policy), is checked claim by claim against those sources. Numbers that come from arithmetic are recomputed rather than copied, and each calculator’s worked examples become automated tests.
4. Before release, every page is rendered and checked on desktop and mobile, every cited link is checked, and the build stops if a page links to something that does not exist.
5. After release, pages built on yearly or monthly figures are revisited when the agency publishes new ones, and the review date on the page moves when its content does.

How the calculators work

Every calculator runs entirely in your browser. What you type is not sent to a server, stored in an account, or used to profile you. Formulas and their assumptions are shown next to the result, so you can check the arithmetic rather than trust it.

How the site is paid for

Practical Atlas is supported by advertising served through Google AdSense. It has no affiliate links, accepts no payment for rankings or placement, and does not review products it has been paid to cover. An advertisement next to a guide is not an endorsement by that guide. See the editorial policy for how pages are researched and the privacy page for what advertising involves.