Editorial policy

The Interior Designer Handbook editorial policy has four rules: every figure comes from a retrieved source, every figure carries its year, no content is paid for or placed by a third party, and every correction is logged. The policy applies to article text, tables, image captions, structured data and the plain-text index at /llms.txt.

How sources are chosen

The editorial team prefers primary sources in this order: statutes and regulations published by a legislature or board, publications of the credentialing bodies (CIDA and CIDQ), federal statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the membership pages of ASID and IIDA, and the price pages of software vendors. Consumer price guides are used only for fee ranges that no primary source publishes, and they are always named with their update date. A source is recorded in the site's source list with the retrieval date and a note of what was taken from it.

How figures are dated and presented

Every statistic on the Interior Designer Handbook names its year in the sentence, every price shows its currency symbol and its year, and every table caption or header names the source edition (for example, the NCIDQ Candidate Handbook 1225 or the BLS May 2025 estimates). When two sources report different ranges for the same fee, both appear with their dates rather than an average. Calculations made by the editorial team, such as a five-year membership total, are labeled as the editorial team's arithmetic.

What the editorial team does not do

The Interior Designer Handbook does not accept payment for articles, links, product mentions or rankings, does not invent author personas or credentials, and does not quote client testimonials. The site names no street address, telephone number or company registration because it has none to publish. Software vendors, associations and schools appear because their public prices and rules are relevant, not because of any relationship with the publisher.

How corrections work

A reported error is checked against the original source within the reply targets on the contact page, and a confirmed error is corrected in the article with a new updated date. Errors of substance (a wrong fee, a wrong statute citation, a wrong wage figure) are corrected in place; the editorial team does not silently rewrite history, and the retrieval date in the source list records when the replacement figure was taken.