Do I Have to File Certified Payroll for a Week With No Work?

29 CFR 5.5(a)(3)(ii)(A) states: "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]." The conditional is doing the work in that sentence. The obligation attaches to weeks in which covered work is performed. Read plainly, a week with no covered work is not a week for which that paragraph requires a submission.

In practice a great many contractors submit a payroll marked no work performed for those weeks, and many agencies expect it. The reason is administrative and quite sensible from the reviewer's side: certified payrolls are numbered in sequence for a project, and a reviewer looking at payrolls 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 cannot tell whether week 4 had no work or whether week 4 is missing. A no-work payroll closes that ambiguity. It is the difference between a gap that means nothing and a gap that has to be chased.

Your contracting agency's instruction. Agencies issue their own requirements to their contractors, and where an agency has told you it wants continuous numbering including no-work weeks, that is what your contract requires of you regardless of the federal baseline. This is one of the clearer examples of a general point about certified payroll: 29 CFR part 5 sets a floor, and the party you actually submit to can ask for more.

Ask the person who reviews your payrolls. If you would rather look it up first, the instruction is often in the labour standards section of the contract, in the agency's contractor handbook, or in whatever portal you submit through — several portals will simply not let you skip a week, which answers the question definitively. If you cannot find it and cannot reach anyone, submitting a no-work payroll is the low-risk choice: no agency has ever objected to a payroll that told them nothing happened.

Head it exactly as you would any other: project, contract number, the next payroll number in the sequence, and the week ending date. Leave the worker rows empty, and say plainly in the remarks area that no covered work was performed during the period. Sign the statement of compliance as usual. The point of the document is to be an unambiguous record that the week was accounted for, so clarity matters more than anything else about it.

One caution worth stating. A no-work payroll is for weeks where no covered work happened. It is not for weeks where work happened and payroll is not ready, or where a subcontractor has not sent their figures. Certifying that no work was performed in a week when it was is a false statement on a document whose page 2 warns that wilful falsification may subject the contractor to civil or criminal prosecution. If payroll is late, it is late — that is a much smaller problem than the alternative.

The same question arises for your subcontractors, and their answers are your exposure under 29 CFR 5.5(a)(6). A sub who simply stops submitting during a quiet month produces exactly the ambiguous gap described above, and the chasing lands on you. Whatever convention your agency wants, make sure every tier knows it, because a mixed approach across subs is worse than either approach applied consistently.