Content Refresh Checklist for Tax-Year Rollover

Tax-year rollover is not a single event. It is a window of six to ten weeks in which the constants a publication cites either update against primary sources or drift into the following year.

The IRS publishes inflation-adjusted constants for the following tax year in October or November of each year, in a revenue procedure and one or more accompanying notices. Not every constant lands in that window: HSA and HDHP thresholds under §223 are announced in a spring revenue procedure — Rev. Proc. 2025-19, published in the spring of 2025, set the 2026 HSA limits months before the October wave. The Social Security Administration publishes its cost-of-living adjustment and related figures in the same window. Every publication that cites tax-year-sensitive constants has a specific responsibility during that window: either the constants update against the primary source, or the publication silently ships last year’s numbers to next year’s readers. This checklist is the working list for making sure the first thing happens.

Before the window: the inventory

• ✓List every page on the site that cites a tax-year-sensitive constant.
• ✓For each page, identify which specific constants it uses (contribution limits, HSA thresholds, standard deduction, estate exclusion, mileage rates, and so on).
• ✓For each constant, identify whether the value is hard-coded in the page or read from a maintained source.
• ✓For each constant that is hard-coded, identify who owns the update.
• ✓For each constant read from a source, identify which source and confirm the source itself is on this list somewhere.

The inventory is worth building even if it looks obvious. Most publications that walk the exercise for the first time discover pages nobody remembered were still live, or constants nobody realized were embedded in JavaScript. The inventory does not need to be perfect the first time; it becomes a durable artifact that grows more useful each year.

During the window: the update

• ✓Subscribe to the IRS newsroom and the SSA press releases so the publication of the revenue procedure is not a surprise.
• ✓The day the revenue procedure lands, read it in full — do not rely on secondary summaries, which sometimes miss changes.
• ✓Update every hard-coded constant on the inventory list, one page at a time, and cross off each page as its update is deployed.
• ✓For every constant read from a source, confirm the source has itself updated; if it has not, follow up with the source before assuming the site is current.
• ✓Before touching constants, scan for legislative changes since the last rollover — new laws and repeals need rewrites, not constant updates.
• ✓Record the date of each update against each page or constant, so the annual review has a clear log.

The window is short. IRS publications typically arrive in mid to late October or early November for the following tax year. The window closes at the end of December, after which readers arriving in January expect current numbers. Publications that treat the window as a one-week task usually miss constants; publications that scope it as a six-week working project usually hit them.

After the window: the audit

• ✓Pick five pages from the inventory at random.
• ✓For each page, look up the primary-source current values and compare against what the page displays.
• ✓Where the page displays the correct value, note the date and move on.
• ✓Where the page displays a stale value, remediate immediately and add the page to a follow-up list.
• ✓Any page appearing on the follow-up list two years in a row indicates a process gap that is not a single missed update; investigate the ownership.

Article-level considerations, not only calculators

Calculators are the visible half of the exercise. Article copy is the quiet half. A personal-finance article naming the contribution limit in prose ages exactly the same way a calculator does. Publications with editorial CMS integrations that let prose reference registry rows dynamically get the same benefit for articles as for calculators; the value in the article stays current because it is not the value, it is a reference to the value. Worthune’s own facts registry (worthune.com/facts) works this way: every row carries an id, a label, a value, a period, a named primary source, and a verified-on date.

Publications without dynamic-reference tooling can still handle articles through the checklist by inventorying which articles cite which constants. The maintenance burden is real, but the benefit is that readers arriving at an evergreen article a year after publication find current numbers instead of last year’s. Article accuracy has always been an editorial responsibility; tax-year rollover is where the responsibility becomes visible.

The reviewer sign-off

Publications with compliance or editorial-oversight roles benefit from a written sign-off at the end of the window. The sign-off is a one-page summary listing every page on the inventory, the date it was updated, and the source it was updated against. The sign-off is stored where future audits can retrieve it. It is a small artifact that pays for itself the first time a question arises about whether a specific page was current on a specific date.

“The tax year rolls over on January 1. The publication’s numbers do not, unless someone spent October and November making sure they would.”

A specific note on repealed law

Rollover is not only about updates; it also includes repeals. The Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset were both repealed by the Social Security Fairness Act, signed on January 5, 2025, with retroactive effect to January 2024.^[1] Any publication whose Social Security content referenced WEP or GPO as live rules through 2024 or 2025 needed a substantive rewrite, not a constant update. Repeals happen; the checklist should include a scan for legislative changes as well as inflation adjustments.

The legislative-scan step is small but important. Every rollover window, before touching constants, spend an hour on legislative changes since the last rollover. The IRS newsroom, the SSA press page, and a general search for financial-planning legislative changes will surface almost everything worth knowing. The one hour is worth many hours of remediation later if a repealed rule remains cited in prose long after it stopped being law.

Two failures the window most commonly produces

The first is the missed source. The IRS publishes a revenue procedure; the SSA publishes a press release; a state agency publishes a bulletin; the editorial team catches two of the three and applies updates from those, and the third source lands quietly and is forgotten. The remedy is subscription: every source the inventory depends on has a feed, an alert, or a mailing list, and the editorial team subscribes to each. The subscription discipline is the difference between catching every source and catching most of them.

The second is the partial update. A page that displays three constants updates two and misses the third, because the third lived in a different template or a different data source. The remedy is the inventory itself: an update is not complete until every constant on a page has been checked, not just the constants the updater remembered. Pages with more than one constant are the ones this failure hits hardest, and the inventory is what makes the difference visible.

When constants move mid-year

Most tax-year constants move on the annual cadence. Some do not. Mid-year adjustments to specific figures — for example, when Congress passes a bill that changes a threshold effective mid-year, or when an agency issues a corrective bulletin — fall outside the tax-year-rollover window. The rollover checklist is the primary maintenance discipline; the mid-year exception is why the subscription discipline in the earlier section is worth keeping active year-round rather than only during October and November.

The handoff, when the calendar rolls over

Editorial teams change composition. The person who ran last year’s rollover may not be the person running this year’s. A handoff document — the inventory, the source subscriptions, the reviewer sign-off from the last cycle — is what makes the transition survivable. Teams that treat the rollover as tribal knowledge rediscover the same missed constants every three or four years, whenever staff turnover crosses a critical threshold. Teams that treat it as a documented, transferable discipline avoid that pattern. The handoff document is small; it is worth more than the time it takes to write.

The handoff also names which sources have been reliable and which have not. Some agencies publish on time; others publish with delays that the editorial calendar has to accommodate. Some sources are consistent year over year; others reorganize their publication structure occasionally and require a rediscovery step. The handoff document is where that operational knowledge lives, and it is what turns the annual rollover from a rediscovery exercise into a routine one.