About In-State Check
In-State Check answers one question: as a resident of state A, what do you pay to study at a public college in state B? The answer depends on four regional compacts, a scatter of two-state agreements, and 51 separate residency codes — and no official source publishes all of it in one place, because no single body administers all of it.
Who publishes it
Everything on this site is published by In-State Check, which is owned and operated by ConnectEra LLC and was founded by Billy Reiner. It is independent of WICHE, MHEC, SREB, NEBHE, every state higher-education agency and every college named on the site. There is no commercial relationship with any institution whose rates appear here.
Who writes and checks it
Billy Reiner is the editor, and the only byline on the site. Compiles every tuition figure on instatecheck.com from the named institution's own published rate page, checks each eligibility rule against the regional compact commission (WICHE, MHEC, SREB, NEBHE) or the state residency statute it cites, and dates every page. Corrections go to [email protected]. There is no collective byline and no invented contributor: if a page is wrong, one named person is answerable for it, and every page carries the date he last checked it.
The editorial standards set out the sourcing rules in full — what counts as a primary source, what happens to a fact that cannot be verified, and how a correction propagates.
How it is built
Every page on this site is generated from a single validated dataset covering all 51 US jurisdictions. The interactive checker and the 7650 state-pair pages run the same rule engine over the same data, so the tool and the pages cannot give different answers. A data correction updates every affected page at once, with no manual editing — which is the only way a grid this size stays accurate.
The build refuses to complete if the dataset is incomplete: a missing jurisdiction, a missing level, a row without a source, or a row without a verification date all fail the build rather than shipping a gap. Methodology has the detail.
What this site will not do
- Tell you that you qualify. Residency classification and exchange-program awards are decided by the institution you apply to. This site tells you which rule governs your case and where to verify it.
- Invent a figure. Where a rate is not published, the page says so rather than estimating.
- Give financial or legal advice. It is a reference, and it says where every claim came from.
Corrections
Write to [email protected] with the page URL and the source that contradicts it. Corrections are made against the primary source and the page is re-dated. The dataset was last verified 2026-09-27.