Methodology

Everything on this site is a public rule, a government fee, or a processing time that somebody else published first. Our work is finding the primary source, reading it, and writing down what it says with the date we read it. This page explains that process, and is honest about what it does not amount to.

Who reviews this site

Content on Captain's License Prep is reviewed by Captain's License Prep editorial team before publication, the byline you see on every guide and on the sea-time calculator. Review here means one specific thing: each load-bearing statement is checked against the primary source it cites, and anything that cannot be traced to a source is cut rather than softened.

What that byline is not: the editorial team is not the U.S. Coast Guard, the National Maritime Center, or the Transportation Security Administration, does not hold a merchant mariner credential or a captain's license, and is not a Coast Guard-approved course provider. We do not issue, endorse, or process any credential, and nothing here is legal advice. The National Maritime Center makes the final call on every application. The authority this site stands on is the sourcing process below, not a license on a wall. See about and editorial standards for the publisher and independence disclosure.

Which sources we use

Federal eligibility rules, sea-time credit, and the conviction assessment periods come from the Code of Federal Regulations, principally 46 CFR Part 10 and Part 11, read on eCFR rather than quoted from a course seller. Application steps, forms, and processing estimates come from the National Maritime Center's own checklists and status bulletins. TWIC facts come from the Transportation Security Administration. Federal fishery permit layers come from NOAA Fisheries and its regional offices.

State charter and guide license facts come from that state's own agency: the fish and wildlife department, marine resources division, or outfitter and guide board that actually issues the license, plus the statute or administrative rule behind it where the agency page is thin. Every jurisdiction on the state charter-license map was read this way, one at a time. Where a primary host blocked an automated read, we say so in the record rather than substituting a third party's summary as if it were the source.

We do not reprint another site's compiled table. Facts are not copyrightable, and the compilation work here is our own: the calculator logic, the processing tracker, the charter map, and the fee statistics study are all built from the underlying public rules.

How a figure gets published

Open the primary source, the agency or regulation itself, not a summary of it.
Read the current value and write it in the words the source uses, including the awkward parts: tiered rates, separate resident and nonresident amounts, fees an agency simply does not publish.
Record the source name, the source URL, and the date it was read, next to the figure.
Register the load-bearing numbers in the site's fact list so a later re-read can find every page that depends on them.
Publish only what cleared those steps. A state that could not be verified against its own sources stays unpublished instead of shipping as a thin page.

As it stands, 51 jurisdictions carry a verified state charter-license file and 18 guides carry this byline. Each one shows the date its facts were read.

What we do not promise

We do not promise a re-verification schedule we cannot guarantee. Government fee schedules and processing bulletins move on their own timetable, and several of the agencies we cite block automated re-reading outright. What we do instead is show you the date every figure was last read from its source, so you can judge for yourself how current it is, and say plainly when an agency does not publish a number at all. Pages whose underlying facts move fastest, the processing tracker most of all, carry that caveat on the page itself.

The most recently verified fact on this site is dated 2026-07-29. That date is computed from the site's own content at build time, not typed in, so it moves as pages are re-read.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong or out of date, tell us: which page, which fact, and what the agency now says. Corrections that check out get fixed and re-dated. Reach the publisher through the Urban Algorithm contact page. Captain's License Prep is a project of Urban Algorithm LLC.