Open methodology
Water Damage Cost & Scope Index
A planned evidence project for comparing what real estimates include—not a price promise, lead auction, or calculator built from an unsupported national average.
What the project is designed to answer
Homeowners often receive totals that cannot be compared because one estimate covers extraction and equipment while another also includes monitoring, demolition, disposal, contents work, or reconstruction. This project will describe those scope differences using verified, redacted source documents. It will not label a contractor cheap, expensive, fair, or unfair.
Publication thresholds
- No national quantitative report before at least100 verified estimates or drying records.
- No state or metro statistic with fewer than10 comparable records.
- Small samples may appear only as clearly labeled individual case studies, never as a market average.
- Medians and 25th–75th percentile ranges will be preferred over a single average because project scope can be highly uneven.
Fields retained after verification
Loss context
Coarse location, month, water-source category, affected-area bucket, and material types.
Scope
Line-item categories, monitoring, equipment duration, demolition, disposal, and rebuild inclusion.
Outcome evidence
Drying duration and relative material readings only when the source record supports them.
Verification
Consent version, reviewer record, artifact review status, and inclusion or exclusion reason.
Information that is never published
Names, exact street addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, claim numbers, policy numbers, signatures, faces, license plates, and unredacted documents are outside the public dataset. Exact event dates are reduced to a month and location is reduced to a state or sufficiently broad metro.
Verification and exclusions
A record must trace to a redacted estimate, invoice, drying log, or comparable source artifact. Duplicate documents, unverifiable screenshots, estimates with unclear currency, and records missing basic scope context are excluded. A professional reviewer may explain technical line items, but reviewer comments do not turn a sample into a property-specific recommendation.
How updates will work
Each release will carry a methodology version, cutoff date, record count, exclusion count, geographic coverage table, and change notes. Corrections will be logged rather than silently overwritten. Compensation from a future referral relationship will not alter inclusion, calculations, or provider labels.