AcceptsTricare.com

Editorial policy

This site covers health benefits, where a confidently wrong answer costs someone real money or a wasted appointment. These are the rules we hold ourselves to.

1. Every factual claim has a named source

Costs, eligibility rules, referral requirements, region assignments, contractor names and pharmacy network status all trace to a specific page on tricare.mil or on a contractor's own site. Where the exact wording matters — network status, eligibility, money — we quote the source rather than paraphrasing it. Sources are linked on the page they support, not buried in a bibliography.

2. Every claim carries a date

TRICARE rules change on contract cycles and at the start of each calendar year. A benefits page without a date is worthless, so ours all show when they were last verified. As of now, that's August 1, 2026. Guide pages additionally carry machine-readable published and modified dates, and a pre-commit check blocks us from editing a guide without updating its review date — so the date you see cannot silently drift away from the content.

3. We do not publish what we cannot verify

This is the rule that costs us traffic, and we keep it anyway. When we researched this site we could not confirm from any official source whether several large pharmacy chains are in the TRICARE retail network. TRICARE publishes answers for a few chains and nothing for the rest.

So those pages say TRICARE publishes no answer, explain why that's the honest response, and send you to the Express Scripts locator to check the specific store. A page that guessed would rank just as well and would sometimes send you to a counter where you'd pay non-network rates.

Other things we deliberately don't publish:

4. Where sources disagree, we say so

We hit real conflicts building this site and recorded rather than resolved them. TRICARE's 2025 region announcement described Arkansas and Wisconsin as moving to the West; the current region page treats both as ZIP-split states. Press reporting puts the pharmacy network around 46,000 locations while tricare.mil says more than 41,000. In each case we follow the more current official source, tell you the conflict exists, and avoid publishing a precise number that two credible sources dispute.

5. Data is derived, never typed

Facility counts, state and city breakdowns and the "near me" rankings are all computed from the dataset retrieved from TRICARE's official locator. Nobody types a number into a page. When the data is refreshed, every count on the site updates with it.

Two fields are derived rather than published by TRICARE, and we label both: whether a facility is a hospital or a clinic, which we read from its official name because TRICARE's locator carries no facility-type field; and coordinates for the facilities TRICARE didn't publish any for, derived from the official street address so the distance tool can rank them.

6. Plans and regions are never collapsed into one answer

The single biggest source of bad TRICARE advice is answering "does TRICARE cover X" without asking which plan and which region. Whether you need a referral for urgent care depends on whether you're active duty. Whether you get a routine eye exam depends on your plan and whether you're retired. We split the answer wherever the answer splits, even when it makes for a longer page.

7. Corrections

Every page has a feedback form, and reports that something is wrong or out of date are triaged ahead of new work. If a fact is wrong we fix it and update the verification date. If a rule has changed rather than us having erred, we say what changed and when — a benefits site that quietly edits history is not one you should trust.

We would genuinely rather hear that a clinic's phone number is stale than have you find out by calling it. Get in touch.

8. Advertising doesn't touch editorial

We intend to carry advertising to fund hosting and maintenance. No advertiser sees a page before it publishes, and no commercial relationship changes a factual answer. Our pharmacy pages state plainly which chains are out of network, and that stays true regardless of who advertises.

9. This is information, not advice

Nothing here is medical advice, and nothing here is a coverage determination. Only your regional contractor can tell you whether a specific provider is in network for you today, and only a clinician can advise on your care. We're a map, not a decision.

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Something wrong, out of date, or missing? Benefit rules change on contract cycles — if a detail here doesn't match what your regional contractor told you, tell us and we'll re-check it.