Methodology & data sources

Last refreshed: 2026-05-03T02:34:39+00:00 · Source: live_partial

Primary sources

FiscalGrid compiles its dataset from four public sources, in order of authority for each topic:

• US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — opm.gov pay-periods fact sheet for the US federal pay-period schedule and the federal fiscal year start.
• US Bureau of the Fiscal Service — fiscaldata.treasury.gov for US federal fiscal calendar reference data.
• Wikipedia: Fiscal year — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_year for the comparative table of fiscal year start dates by country.
• Wikidata — query.wikidata.org SPARQL endpoint for structured public-holiday records associated with each country's Q-item for fiscal year entities.

Build process

Source data is fetched once at build time by a PHP CLI script (php seed.php) that writes normalised JSON files to disk. Page templates read those JSON files at request time and render plain HTML. There is no live API call from any page — every render is purely a file read against the snapshot taken at build.

Fallback policy

If a primary source is unreachable at seed time (rate-limited, returning HTTP errors, or otherwise unavailable), the build falls back to a curated set of 150+ realistic fiscal calendar entries covering: 12 monthly templates across five fiscal-year conventions (US October–September, UK April–March, Australia July–June, India April–March, Canada April–March), quarterly breakdown pages for each, and 20+ country-specific fiscal year overview pages — all derived from well-established public fiscal calendar conventions documented across the sources above.

The data/source.json file in the repository records which path was taken on the most recent build, so it is always traceable whether the live page set is from live source fetches or from the curated fallback. The build also records the fetch timestamp.

Known limitations

Holiday observance rules — for example, what happens when a federal holiday lands on a weekend, or how regional non-federal holidays are treated — vary by jurisdiction and by employer. We document the canonical date for each holiday and note observance considerations in the holiday's own page, but the canonical observance authority is always the local statutory body, not this site.

Fiscal year naming conventions also differ. The US federal government uses the year of fiscal-year end (FY2025 = Oct 1, 2024 – Sep 30, 2025); the UK Self Assessment year is named by the year of fiscal-year start (FY2025/26 = April 6, 2025 – April 5, 2026). Each country page calls out which convention it uses.