Certified Payroll: A Contractor's Guide

The obligation attaches to contractors and subcontractors performing work on federally funded and federally assisted construction contracts covered by the Davis-Bacon and Related Acts. It reaches down the chain: every tier performing covered work files for its own workers. It is not limited to the prime, and it is not limited to firms with an office and a payroll department. A two-person specialist on site for three weeks has the same weekly obligation as a general contractor with four hundred employees.

Weekly. 29 CFR 5.5(a)(3)(ii)(A): "The contractor or subcontractor must submit weekly, for each week in which any DBA- or Related Acts-covered work is performed, certified payrolls to the [appropriate Federal agency]." Note that the obligation is tied to weeks in which covered work happened. Practice on weeks with no work varies by agency, and is covered separately in our guide on that question.

29 CFR 5.5(a)(3)(i) lists the record contents directly: "the name; Social Security number; last known address, telephone number, and email address of each such worker; each worker's correct classification(s) of work actually performed; hourly rates of wages paid (including rates of contributions or costs anticipated for bona fide fringe benefits or cash equivalents thereof...); daily and weekly number of hours actually worked in total and on each covered contract; deductions made; and actual wages paid." Read as a checklist, that paragraph answers most questions about completeness.

A distinction worth being precise about, because it trips people up. The paragraph above governs the records you keep, and it does require the Social Security number. The document you submit is different: column (1E) of Form WH-347 is headed "WORKER IDENTIFYING NO.", and contractors commonly enter the last four digits. Certified payrolls can be disclosed — the form warns that information reported in them may be released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request — so sending a full Social Security number where an identifying number is asked for creates exposure with no corresponding benefit.

Form WH-347 is the standard vehicle, currently in its January 2025 revision. Its use is optional — the form says so on its face — but it collects exactly what the regulation requires, which is why most contractors use it rather than building an equivalent. Page 1 is the payroll detail, eight workers per sheet. Page 2 is the statement of compliance, which since the 2025 revision also carries a per-worker table of fringe benefit credits across six plan columns.

The statement of compliance is not a formality. It certifies, in six separate certifications on the current form, that the payroll is correct and complete, that records are available on request, that classifications reflect work actually performed, that any apprentices are duly registered, that fringe benefits were paid in cash or to bona fide plans, and that full weekly wages were paid with no deductions beyond those 29 CFR part 3 permits. The bottom of the page warns that wilful falsification may subject the contractor to civil or criminal prosecution. It should be signed by someone in a position to know it is true.

The federal overtime rule for covered work is weekly, not daily. 29 CFR 5.5(b)(1) requires compensation "at a rate not less than one and one-half times the basic rate of pay for all hours worked in excess of forty hours in such workweek". Two things follow that are commonly got wrong: there is no federal daily threshold, and the multiplier applies to the basic rate rather than to the rate including fringe. States may impose more, and several do.

With the prime, further than most primes expect. 29 CFR 5.5(a)(6): "The prime contractor is responsible for the compliance by any subcontractor or lower tier subcontractor with all the contract clauses in this section." There is no carve-out for tiers you did not select or did not know about. In practice this is the single most important structural fact about certified payroll for a general contractor, because the failures concentrate in the small lower-tier firms least equipped to handle the paperwork.

The common failures are unglamorous: a classification that is an internal job title rather than one from the wage determination, hours that do not add up between the daily grid and the weekly total, an apprentice rate paid to someone whose registration was never completed, fringe credit claimed without the plan detail to support it. Consequences run from withheld payment — which arrives first and hurts soonest — through back wages and liquidated damages of $33 per worker per day for overtime violations, to debarment for three years under 29 CFR 5.12(a)(1) where obligations have been disregarded.

File on the same day every week, have one person accountable, read the first submission from every new subcontractor line by line, and keep the wage determination as incorporated into your contract where whoever prepares payroll can see it. None of that is expensive. Almost every serious certified payroll problem we have seen described started as a small error that repeated weekly because nobody was looking.