household-calc

household-calc is a command for coding agents from PolicyEngine/policyengine-claude. It costs 25 tokens per session (533 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command for calculating benefits, taxes, and net income for one household under current rules or a proposed change. It is a household-level calculation, not an estimate for an entire population.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for cases involving household composition, income, benefits, tax credits, marginal tax rates, or reforms in the United States, United Kingdom, or Canada.
Why use it?
It answers what a specific household may receive or pay without confusing that result with the total cost or reach of a policy.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/policyengine/policyengine-claude/household-calc
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PolicyEngine/policyengine-claude

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for household-calc

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/policyengine/policyengine-claude/household-calc.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/policyengine/policyengine-claude/household-calc)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/policyengine/policyengine-claude/household-calc"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/policyengine/policyengine-claude/household-calc.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 25 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 533 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00025 $0.00533
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00267
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00107
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00053

Measured 5d ago against content hash 110b28be5234, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

household-calc scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

commands/household-calc.md · 43 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 43 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Household calculation

Answer "what would this specific household get?" questions. Standalone entry for household-level microsimulation — not population-level (/analyze-policy handles that).

When to use

  • "What would a single parent making $35K with two kids get from SNAP + CTC in Texas?"
  • "How does a married couple filing jointly in California with $200K W-2 income + $30K SALT compare under the current cap vs $60K cap?"
  • "What's the effective marginal tax rate for a childless adult earning $18/hr in New York?"

Do NOT use for population-level questions ("how many households benefit"; "what's the aggregate cost") — those need /analyze-policy or the microsimulation skill.

Arguments

$ARGUMENTS — natural-language household description + question. Include:

  • Country (US, UK, CA) and state / province if relevant
  • Household composition (single, married, dependents with ages)
  • Income sources ($ amounts for wages, SS, unemployment, etc.)
  • The question — baseline benefits? A specific reform? A marginal-rate calculation?

Flags:

  • --year YYYY (default: current tax/benefit year)
  • --reform <preset-name-or-dict> — apply a preset reform (see presets/reforms/) or a raw reform-dict JSON before calculating
  • --reform-file PATH — load reform-dict from a file

What this command does

  1. Loads the appropriate country skill (policyengine-us / policyengine-uk / policyengine-canada) — these carry the correct API patterns for the current package version.
  2. Constructs a Simulation (household-level, not Microsimulation) using the parsed household description.
  3. Calculates the variables the user asked about (net income, specific benefit, tax owed, marginal rate).
  4. Reports baseline values, reform values (if --reform), and the delta.
  5. Optionally cites the parameter paths that drove each result so the analyst can trace numbers back to statute.
  • /analyze-policy — population-level version. Use when the question is about aggregate cost or distribution, not a single household.
  • /prior-scores — consult external benchmark cluster for the reform without running any microsim.
  • policyengine-us skill — the underlying API pattern reference.

Read the full file on GitHub · 43 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 43 lines · 25 tokens per session scan A 110b28be5234

Subscribe to this mod's changes

household-calc is a command published in the GitHub repository PolicyEngine/policyengine-claude (32 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 533 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.