What I learned collecting car registration fees for all 50 states

Every state hides its real car registration cost in a different place. The base fee sits on one page, the value tax hides in a statute, and the local fees live at the county level. Nothing is ever in one spot.

The surprises were fun. Colorado charges an ownership tax based on the car's value, 2.1% in the first year. Florida has a $225 initial registration fee on top of everything else. Oregon does not charge sales tax on cars at all.

I pulled it all together into one dataset and put it at https://statefeecalculator.com. Registration fee, title fee, and taxes for every state, all in one place.

For the builders here: how do you handle messy public data like this? Do you scrape it, hand-verify it, or mix both?