Companies quote different rates by state because the law lets them charge different rates by state. This is the whole table . rEgulator-sourced, dated, and free for anyone to cite with a link back.
The table has one row per state and four columns: the fee cap, whether the firm needs a license or bond, whether settlement companies are banned outright, and the source link with its date. A cap can be a percentage, a dollar total, or both, so read the unit before comparing rows.
A blank cell means we have not verified that state yet. It does not mean there is no rule. The table is being built entry by entry, and nothing lands in a cell until a person has checked it against the regulator's own text. Until then, treat blanks as unknowns, not zeros. That honesty is the product. Half-filled tables printed with confident guesses are how people end up signing things they should not.
Every entry starts from a primary source: the state statute or regulation itself, or the licensing page of the state agency that oversees debt settlement. We log the citation, the version we read, and the date we last checked it. No entry comes from another review site's table.
Where a state's published text and its agency summary disagree, we say so on the row and keep working it. You can check any cell yourself in minutes: your state attorney general's consumer protection page, or the CFPB database of state rules. If you spot an error, email editor@thepennybrief.com and the fix goes on the page, visibly.
Open your state's row before your first consultation, then make three checks. First, does your state allow settlement companies at all, and is the firm licensed there? Ask for the license number and match it against the state registry. Second, find your state's cap and its unit. A quote above the stated ceiling, or one that ignores a dollar total, deserves a hard pause. Third, get the quote in writing with the state rule named.
Companies quote different rates by state because the legal ceilings differ. Your quote should fit your state's law, and a firm that cannot explain why it does just told you something. If it does not fit, your state attorney general and the CFPB accept complaints.
This table is original work: compiled, dated and checked by us, and free to cite. If you use it, two requests. Link back to this page so readers land on the live version with its check dates, because a copied snapshot of this table goes stale within months. And note the date you pulled the number you quote. A citation that carries its own check date tells readers exactly how old the figure is.
We ask the same thing of every source we cite, so we hold ourselves to it. Want the full dataset as a file for research or journalism? Email editor@thepennybrief.com first and we will talk.
Where sources fight, we keep the fight visible instead of averaging it away. Some states publish a cap in one place and administer it differently somewhere else. Some limits live in agency rules, not the statute, so a quick code search can miss them. Older pages around the internet still describe rules that were amended years ago.
Any cell we are unsure of carries a to-verify marker and a line on what exactly is in question. We recheck the table quarterly, because legislatures meet and numbers move. If you are a licensee, a regulator or a researcher and you see a mismatch, write to us. We would rather show you the uncertainty than print a confident wrong number.