How we work

Editorial policy

Effective August 28, 2026 · Version 1

Refund Radar is an educational, privacy-first utility. We publish general consumer guidance after review against primary sources where available. We do not accept payment to change a recommendation, label a time-sensitive issue, or alter a scanner result. If a link may earn a commission, we label it clearly and present the relevant official resource first.

The commitments on this page are written now, while the site carries no advertising, no sponsorship and no affiliate or referral links anywhere, and while nothing has been sold to anybody. A policy drafted after the first payment arrives is worth considerably less than one drafted before it.

They are also written down where the work happens rather than only here. The governance record for every scanner situation lives in content/sources.json in the site's repository, and it carries both the rule against paid placement and the field requirements the build enforces. This page explains the rest: where the facts come from, what each page has to carry, how a mistake gets corrected and how quickly, and what the site leaves to you.

How sources are selected

The order is fixed. A statement about a rule rests on the rule: the statute or regulation itself, or the enforcing agency's own consumer-facing page. In practice that means the Department of Transportation on airline refunds, the CFPB on card billing errors and disputes, the FTC on auto-renewals and shipping deadlines, and the CPSC on recalls.

For anything contractual rather than statutory — a return window, a marketplace protection period, a fare rule — the primary source is the company's own published terms, and the guide says plainly that it is policy rather than law.

Consumer blogs, forum threads, and journalism are read as context: useful for surfacing what is going wrong this month, useless as authority. Our standard is that no rule is stated here on the strength of a secondary summary.

• Our standard is that no URL is published unless someone has opened it and read what it says. A plausible-looking government link is worse than no link, because it borrows authority it has not earned.
• Where a rule matters but no official page exists to point at, the guide names it in prose and tells you where to look it up, as the missing-delivery guide does with the FTC's mail, internet, or telephone order rule. It stays unlinked rather than guessed at.
• Where a threshold or deadline has been revised recently, the page describes the shape of the rule and sends you to the official text for the number. Quoting a stale figure at an airline or an issuer undercuts an otherwise sound request.

What every page carries

The standard is that each scanner situation and each published guide carries four things: the date it was last reviewed, a named review owner, the jurisdiction the guidance is scoped to, and either at least one primary source or a written statement of why no primary source applies. The review owner is Refund Radar editorial at Oak and Main Developers LLC, the operator of the site.

For the scanner records that requirement is machine-checked. They live in content/sources.json, one entry per situation, and the build fails if an entry is missing its jurisdiction, its reviewed date, its review owner or its source list, or leaves the source list empty without writing down why. The guides carry the same four fields under the same rule, checked by reading rather than by a script.

That fourth item is the one people miss. An empty source list is a claim, not an omission: where no federal rule applies, the record says so and names what governs instead.

A reviewed date tells you how current our reading was on that day. It does not tell you the rule is unchanged today. Where your money or a deadline turns on the detail, read the official source before you act.

The review cadence

We aim to review each record quarterly, and the next review date is written into the record itself rather than kept in somebody's head. A review means reopening each linked page, checking it still says what we said it said, and either re-dating the record or changing the guidance. A fresh date on text nobody re-read is the failure this cadence exists to prevent.

A link checker requests every source URL the site publishes and reports anything that has moved or died. We run it before a source change goes out and again on the review date. It is deliberately outside the build check, so that a government site being briefly down cannot block a deployment — which does mean it depends on a person remembering to run it. If the rule moved with the link, the sentence is rewritten or removed before any date is refreshed.

These are the standards the site is held to, not a guarantee that every page meets them on any given day. If you find one that falls short — an unopened link, a missing jurisdiction line, a record sitting past its review date — tell us at [email protected] and it will be handled as a correction report.

How corrections work

Report a correction to [email protected]. A useful report gives the page address, the sentence you think is wrong, and where the official source says otherwise. Please do not send account numbers, card details, or claim documents; that address is also the privacy contact, and the site is built not to hold material of that kind.

We aim to acknowledge a report within two business days and to say what we intend to do about it. Once we agree a material correction is needed, the target is five business days to publish the fix. Where the error is deadline-bearing — a clock, a notice window, an order of steps that has to happen before a deadline runs out — it goes ahead of the queue, and the aim is to correct it or take it down the same day. If we think the page is right, you get the reasoning and the source rather than silence. These are targets rather than guarantees, and a missed one is itself worth reporting.

• If a claim cannot be supported on re-reading, it comes down first and is repaired second. An unsupportable sentence does not stay up while somebody works out how to rewrite it.
• A material correction is one that changes what a reader would do: a deadline, an escalation order, who to contact first, whether a rule applies at all. It is fixed on the page, carries a dated correction note there, and the reviewed date moves with it.
• A typo, a broken link, or a rewording that does not change the meaning is fixed without a note.
• If a report goes unanswered, send it again with "second request" in the subject line. That address reaches the operator directly.

Independence from any future referral economics

The site is free to use and there is an intention to fund it eventually. The rules below are what a compensated link would have to satisfy before it could appear, and the same list gates the release that first carries one: the affiliate disclosure page, the terms page, and the governance record all change in that release rather than after it.

• No payment buys a place in the scanner's situation list or the guide library, changes the order of an escalation path, or causes an issue to be labelled time-sensitive.
• A compensated link is labelled where it appears, in the body of the page, not only in a footer disclosure.
• The official or free route is presented first and in its own right, and reads exactly as it would if no compensated link existed.
• No compensated link appears in a scanner result, a suggested first step, or a time-sensitive alert.
• A commercial relationship is never a reason to remove a criticism, soften a warning, or drop a company from a guide.

What this site deliberately does not do

• It does not file anything. No claim, dispute, complaint, or letter goes to a merchant, an airline, an issuer, or an agency on your behalf. The scanner drafts wording for you to work from; you edit it and send it yourself, from your own account.
• It does not determine eligibility. A scanner signal means the situation you described is one where a refund path sometimes exists, not a finding that you are owed money. The facts, the contract, the payment method, the jurisdiction, and the deadline decide that.
• It does not take credentials. There is no account, no bank or card connection, no inbox access, and no document upload. We will never ask you for a password, a card number, or a bank login. If you see a page that looks like ours asking for any of them, do not enter anything, and email [email protected] — treat it as fraudulent whatever the address bar says.
• It does not keep your scan. The answers stay in the browser's temporary page memory and are gone when you refresh, as the privacy page describes.
• It does not act for you or take a share of what you recover. There is no fee and no percentage, no representation before a company or an agency, and none of this is legal, financial, or tax advice.

Limits that catch people out

• Federal rules often set a minimum and some states add protections on top. That is not universal — in some areas, air travel especially, federal law limits what state law can add. Check your own state's rules, or ask a lawyer, before relying on a state-law right.
• Silence is usually acceptance. On a schedule change, doing nothing until the deadline in the notice generally counts as agreeing to the new itinerary, and the refund option goes with it. The significant schedule change guide sets out how to decline in time.
• Taking what is offered can spend the right to ask for money. Accepting a voucher, a travel credit, or a rebooking generally ends the claim to a cash refund for that ticket, as the cancelled flight guide explains. Decline in writing first if the refund is what you want.
• Marketplace buyer protection is contractual, not statutory, and its window is usually shorter than any legal deadline — often counted in days from the estimated delivery date. The missing-delivery guide covers finding yours before you spend a fortnight in seller support.
• A phone call is not written notice. The federal billing-error process runs on a 60-day clock from the statement that first showed the error, and it wants writing to the issuer's billing-inquiries address. The credit-card billing error guide sets out what the issuer must then do.
• General guidance is not your situation. Two passengers on the same cancelled flight can end up in different places because of the fare, the booking channel, and what each of them already accepted.
• Sample wording, including anything the scanner drafts for you, is a starting point. Check every fact in it against your own case before sending; a request with the wrong date or amount is easier to refuse than to answer.