Best 2 Retire

Site updates

A plain record of what has changed on Best2Retire and when. New entries are added as the site is updated.

Pages show a Last reviewed date once they have been checked against official sources. A page marked Not yet re-reviewed came across from the earlier version of the site and is still waiting for that check. We are working through the site, so more pages will gain review dates over time. See the editorial policy for how content is produced and checked.

November 7, 2026: Site rebuilt and first round of fact-checking

  • Best2Retire was rebuilt on a new platform. Every existing page address was kept.
  • The design was refreshed, with light and dark themes and a sidebar of recent articles.
  • All 61 national park pages were checked against official sources, mostly nps.gov. Wrong acreage and airport data was corrected, and each page now has a Sources list and a review date.
  • Added a National Park Service sites finder (historic sites, battlefields, monuments, seashores and more, built from the National Park Service's own data) and a Beyond the national parks page covering national forests, wildlife refuges and other federal lands. Each state page now shows how many National Park Service sites it has.
  • Rewrote the senior pass guide to use the pass's official name, America the Beautiful, and to make clear it covers far more than national parks: national forests, wildlife refuges, historic sites and battlefields, run by six federal agencies. Added official links for buying one and for finding places to use it. The guide now breaks the National Park Service's 434 sites down by kind (only 64 are national parks; 139 are historic sites and historical parks) and explains how National Historic Landmarks differ from National Historic Sites.
  • 13 guides with time-sensitive details were checked against official sources: state park senior discounts, Social Security, Medicare and healthcare, credit cards, hotel programs, senior discounts and the national parks senior pass. Wrong or stale facts were corrected, and figures that change every year now point to the official page instead of quoting numbers.
  • Added a Current Offers page for hotel, airline, car rental and credit card promotions. Each offer links to the company's own page and shows the date we verified it. Expired or out-of-date offers are removed automatically.
  • Added the co-branded credit card for each hotel loyalty program to the hotel rewards guide, linked to the card issuer's own page.
  • State income tax rates for Delaware, Montana and New Hampshire were corrected, along with which states tax Social Security benefits.
  • The three Top 10 pages (tax burden, safest states, best states to retire) are now generated from the ranking data, so they always match the full rankings.
  • Added the About, How we rank and Editorial policy pages.
  • 45 near-identical "Best Small Towns" articles were hidden from search engines while they are reviewed. The pages are still on the site.

August 2024: Content carried over to a Drupal site

  • The site's content was carried over from an earlier version of the site into a Drupal website. This is why many pages show the same 2024 date in older records.

Found a mistake? Tell us and we will check it.