New WH-347 Form: What Changed and When It Takes Effect

The current form is marked Rev. January 2025, carries OMB control number 1235-0008, and shows an expiration of 01/31/2028. The Office of Management and Budget's record for that control number shows the collection was received on 27 November 2024 and approved with change on 6 January 2025. The Department's own notice for that submission states that substantive edits to the form were last made in 2011. So the revision is real, it is recent, and it is the first in well over a decade. That alone explains why so many payroll systems still export the older field set.

Page 2 now carries a table headed HOURLY CREDIT FOR FRINGE BENEFITS with six plan columns. For each plan you give a name, a type and a plan number, tick whether the plan is funded or unfunded, and then state the hourly credit claimed for each worker under it. The instruction printed on the form reads: "If an amount is listed in (6B) on the first page of this certified payroll form, enter the hourly credit claimed under each plan name, type and number for each worker and check whether the plan is funded or unfunded." That is considerably more detail than a single fringe figure, and it is where most of the additional work sits.

Worth understanding before you start. The six plan columns are defined once for the whole sheet: you name each plan, its type, its number and whether it is funded at the head of the column, and each of the eight worker rows then carries only the hourly credit claimed under that plan. So the limit of six applies to the distinct plans on the sheet, not to any individual worker. A crew where different trades sit on different benefit packages can run out of columns faster than you would expect, and that is a problem to discover before the week you file rather than during it.

Column (2) of page 1 asks you to identify each worker as a journeyworker (J) or a registered apprentice (RA). Page 2 adds an apprenticeship table with room for three programmes, asking for the programme name, the labour classification, and a tick indicating whether the programme is registered with the Office of Apprenticeship or with a State Apprenticeship Agency. That tracks 29 CFR 5.5(a)(4)(i), which permits apprentices to be paid less than the predetermined rate only when they are "individually registered in a bona fide apprenticeship program" registered with the OA or with a State Apprenticeship Agency recognised by the OA. Both words matter: individually, and bona fide.

The header block includes a field for the wage determination number. Page 1 asks for gross amount earned on this project (7A), gross amount earned for all work (7B), and net pay to the worker for all work (9), alongside a deductions block broken into tax withholdings, FICA, other, and a total. The "other" column is printed with the instruction MUST SPECIFY, and that matters more than it looks: page 2 cites 29 CFR part 3 as the limit on permissible deductions, and a deduction nobody has named cannot be checked against that list by anyone reviewing it.

The statement of compliance now presents six separate certifications, each with its own checkbox: that the payroll information is correct and complete including any fringe credit taken; that regular payrolls and basic records are complete, accurate and available on request; that the classifications reported are the work actually performed; that any apprentices are duly registered; that fringe benefits have been paid in cash or to bona fide plans; and that full weekly wages were paid with no deductions beyond those permitted by 29 CFR part 3. The signature block asks for a telephone number and an email address as well as a date.

Established: the form was revised and approved in January 2025, and the collection is authorised through 31 January 2028. Not established, at least not anywhere we could find it, is a date on which the previous version stops being accepted. Industry sources state 30 September 2026 without citing an authority, and they do not entirely agree with each other — one treats 30 September as the last valid day, another as the first mandatory one. If your contracting agency has told you a date, that instruction governs your contract regardless of what is or is not published federally.

The practical answer does not depend on the deadline question at all. The revised form asks for information most payroll exports do not produce: funded versus unfunded fringe detail, plan numbers, apprentice registration, a wage determination number. If somebody on your team is retyping those every week, that is worth fixing whether the cutover is next month or next year, because manual transcription is where audit problems start. Run one real week of payroll through the current form and you will find out immediately which fields your system does not give you.