When Does the Old WH-347 Expire?

Search this question and you will find the same date repeated. The previous version of the WH-347 remains usable until 30 September 2026, and only the revised form is accepted afterwards. It is stated by payroll providers, compliance consultants and certified payroll portals alike, consistently enough that something was clearly communicated at some point. It is worth noticing that the sources do not entirely agree with one another: some treat 30 September as the last day the old form is valid, others as the first day the new one is mandatory. That is a one-day difference, and it matters if you happen to be filing that week.

We looked in the four places a federal form deadline would normally appear. The form itself, which prints Rev. January 2025, OMB No. 1235-0008 and Expires 01/31/2028, and carries no transition language anywhere in its text. The Federal Register, including every document matching WH-347 certified payroll and every Davis-Bacon Certified Payroll notice published since August 2024. The notice that actually approved the revision, published 27 November 2024, which contains no mandatory adoption date and no transition period. And OMB's own information collection record for control number 1235-0008, which shows the revision approved with change on 6 January 2025 and records no discontinued versions and no transition dates.

The form prints "Expires: 01/31/2028" in the top right corner, and it is easy to read that as the answer to this question. It is not. That is the expiration of the OMB control number under the Paperwork Reduction Act — the date the Department's authorisation to collect this information lapses and has to be renewed. It says nothing at all about which version of the form is acceptable to an agency. Every federal form carries one of these dates and they roll forward every few years.

Here is the practical point that gets lost in the search results. Certified payroll is submitted to a contracting agency, and agencies issue instructions to their own contractors. If the compliance administrator on your project has told you which form version to use and from when, that instruction governs your contract whether or not it matches anything published federally. One email to the person who reviews your payrolls will get you a better answer than any article on this subject, including this one. It also creates a record that you asked.

We build software for certified payroll, so we have an obvious commercial interest in a deadline that makes people act quickly. That is exactly why we will not assert one we cannot source. If we told you the old form expires on a specific date, and it turned out we were repeating something nobody had verified, the correct conclusion for you to draw would be that nothing else we publish is checkable either. Every other compliance claim on this site cites the regulation it rests on and quotes it. This one cannot, so it is labelled rather than dressed up.

The deadline question does not change what you should do next. The January 2025 form is the current form. It asks for information that most payroll systems do not export: funded versus unfunded fringe with plan names and numbers, apprentice registration detail, a wage determination number, gross and net pay. Whatever the cutover date turns out to be, the work of getting those fields out of your system is identical, and it is far better done in a quiet week than in the week a payroll comes back rejected and a progress payment stops moving.

There is one more reason not to wait for certainty. Under 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." Second-tier subcontractors are the least likely to have updated anything, and their submissions land on you. Telling them which form to use now is considerably cheaper than correcting their payrolls later, and it is a conversation you can have without knowing the exact deadline.