Certified Payroll Requirements: A Small Contractor's Weekly Workflow (WH-347)

Certified payroll requirements apply to every federal or federally assisted construction contract over $2,000 (Davis-Bacon Act, 40 U.S.C. 3142). A payroll is "certified" when you do three things. You report every laborer and mechanic in full. You pay each one at least the prevailing wage and fringe for their classification. And an officer signs the Statement of Compliance swearing to it. On federal jobs, that report is Form WH-347, filed weekly.

The rules read like they were written for a compliance department. Most shops doing this work do not have one. One small sub put it plainly. Certified payroll on two projects takes "2-3 hours every Friday." The platforms that automate it are "priced for 100+ employee companies." And "we've got 12 guys." This page sequences the whole job for a shop that size. Pull the rate, classify the worker, run fringe per hour, fill the WH-347, submit to the prime. It closes with the part nobody warns primes about: inheriting a subcontractor's mistakes.

What is certified payroll, and what makes a payroll "certified"?

The word doing the work is certified. A regular payroll becomes certified the moment an owner or officer signs the sworn Statement of Compliance on the back of the WH-347. That signature makes four sworn claims. Every worker got at least the prevailing wage and fringe for their classification. The classifications are right. The deductions were lawful. The record is true (29 CFR 5.5(a)(3)(ii)). A false statement is not a paperwork slip. The Copeland Act requires that sworn weekly statement (29 CFR Part 3); willfully falsifying it is a federal crime — the WH-347 itself cites 18 U.S.C. 1001.

ADP, QuickBooks, and dol.gov all define the term the same way. Google's AI Overview answers it inline. So we will not re-define it here. The definition is the easy part. The certified payroll requirements, the math, and the weekly grind are where shops lose money. That is where the rest of this pillar goes.

What are the requirements for certified payroll?

Read the certified payroll requirements as a checklist keyed to the WH-347 line items. Every column on the form is a requirement. The signed statement ties them together. Here is the whole form, one row per requirement:

Two requirements sit outside that grid. Weekly submission: the certified payroll report is due within seven days of the pay date, every week the job runs (29 CFR 5.5(a)(3)(ii)). No-work weeks: if the crew was off the covered job, most primes still want a payroll marked "no work," so the record has no gaps (see no-work weeks).

The form header carries its own required fields. Each report needs a payroll number — sequential, starting at 1 for your first week and marked "final" on your last. It also needs the project name, the project/contract number, and a box for whether you file as the prime contractor/subcontractor. Apprentices add one more rule. They earn the lower apprentice rate only inside a registered program and within the allowed apprentice ratio to journeymen.

Download the current form each cycle. DOL posts a fillable WH-347 and instructions on its WH-347 page. Practitioners flagged a late-2025 revision — a new OMB expiration and updated compliance language. Agencies expect the current version, not last year's saved copy.

How do I do a certified payroll? The weekly workflow

Federal certified payroll requirements come down to five weekly steps. Nobody sequences them in order, which is why the first job feels like guesswork. Run them the same way every Friday and the report stops being a scramble.

Run the same five steps every Friday and certified payroll stops being a scramble.

Step 1 — Pull the wage determination

Start with the rate, not the timesheet. Look up the active wage determination for your county and construction type on SAM.gov. The four types are building, residential, highway, and heavy. Record the base rate and fringe rate for every classification on the job. There is no national number. The rate changes by county and by type, and a determination can be modified mid-project. New to reading one? Start with how to read a wage determination. Then browse your area on the prevailing wage rates hub.

Step 2 — Classify each worker

Match each worker to the exact classification whose duties they performed. An electrician pulling wire is an electrician. The same person digging a trench for an hour is a laborer for that hour. You should have picked these classifications when you bid the work. As one contractor put it, "you should have already picked the classification of the workers when bidding the work." The certified payroll has to use the same lines you priced. Guessing is the fastest way to underpay. Misclassification is the mistake reviewers catch most.

Step 3 — Pay and record fringe per hour worked

Fringe is owed per hour worked, not as a flat weekly sum. Multiply the fringe rate by the worker's actual hours that week. Pay a flat $750 to someone who logs 46 hours and the effective fringe drops to about $16.30 an hour. Against an $18.75 rate, that is a $2.45 shortfall on every hour. That gap is what back-wage findings are built on. One shop paid $13,508 on a single project for this exact error. The full per-hour method, the benefit-credit math, and the overtime twist live in fringe per hour. For this workflow the rule is short: fringe multiplies against real hours, every week.

Step 4 — Fill out the WH-347

Enter each worker on their own row. Record classification, hours by day, straight-time and overtime split out, rate of pay, gross earned, itemized deductions, and net wages. Then sign the Statement of Compliance on the back. That is the step that certifies the payroll. The fringe benefits column is the one most reports get wrong. The WH-347 walkthrough covers every field.

Step 5 — Submit weekly to the prime or agency

Send the signed certified payroll within seven days of the pay date, every week the job runs. Most subs submit up to the prime, who bundles everyone's payrolls. Some agencies take them directly or through a portal. One sub summed up the reality: the prime "wants certified payroll submitted weekly, no exceptions." Keep a copy. You must retain payroll and basic records for three years after the job closes (FAR 52.222-8).

A worked certified-payroll line, from determination to WH-347

Numbers make the workflow concrete. Take an electrician on a building determination. The base rate is $35.00/hr and the fringe rate is $18.75/hr. That is a total prevailing wage of $53.75/hr. Pull your own county's live figure before you rely on it — this is an example line, not your rate. Say the worker logs a straight 40-hour week. You deliver the fringe as cash, the simplest option that always complies. Here is how that single worker maps onto the WH-347:

The gross the DOL checks is base plus fringe on every hour worked. Deliver the fringe as cash or a bona-fide benefit plan and the total owed does not change.

The gross the DOL cares about is the $2,150.00 — base plus fringe on every hour worked. Deliver the fringe through a bona-fide benefit plan instead of cash and the split changes. The total owed does not. For an overtime week or a benefit-credit calculation, the certified payroll calculator runs the per-worker fringe and the leftover cash for a given county rate.

What is the difference between regular payroll and certified payroll?

Same paychecks, different rulebook. The certified payroll requirements add three things regular payroll never asks for: a set wage floor, weekly reporting, and a sworn statement. The gap is what gets audited:

Do Davis-Bacon wages have to be paid weekly?

Weekly pay is a Davis-Bacon requirement, not a preference (29 CFR 5.5(a)(1)). A monthly or biweekly cycle for the covered crew is itself a violation, even when the total is right. Some state programs allow monthly certified-payroll submission — California's DIR does. But that is the report cadence, not the pay cadence. It is a different program from federal Davis-Bacon. The weekly pay requirement spoke covers the edge cases.

Reconciling a subcontractor's certified payroll as the prime

Here is the requirement nobody puts on the checklist. As the prime, your subs' mistakes become your audit exposure. You collect their certified payrolls. You submit the package. When the DOL pulls records, the shortfalls on a sub's WH-347 land on the project you signed for.

One small federal contractor described the daily version. They collect jobsite sign-in sheets and weekly subcontractor payrolls, "and the data often doesn't match." Workers appear on the sign-in sheet but not the payroll. Hours on the payroll don't line up with the sheets. "Classifications/rates don't match what's expected for the work performed." Chasing subs for corrections became "a huge time sink" that still left them "exposed to risk." That is not a rare edge case. It is the standing condition of being a prime on a job with subs.

Reconcile every sub's certified payroll against these three checks before you approve it. This is where back-wage exposure starts.

Reconcile every sub's certified payroll against three checks before you approve it:

The third check is fast, and it is where the money hides. Divide each worker's weekly fringe by the hours on that row. Confirm the result meets the determination's fringe rate. Anything below it is a shortfall. Send it back before you pay — while it is still the sub's problem, not yours. The contractors who watch this hardest are not scared of the back wages. They are scared of debarment from the federal pipeline. That is the loss that does not recover. Catch a sub's error upstream and it stays off your record.

Do you need a certification (or a CPP) to do certified payroll?

The term confuses people the first time they see it in a job ad. One payroll pro asked outright whether "certified payroll" meant the work had to be done "by someone with CPP certification." It does not. The report is certified. The person is not required to be. Still, whoever signs the Statement of Compliance is personally attesting the numbers are right. The signer has to understand the wage determination, the classifications, and the fringe math. A title is no substitute for that. A CPP or a compliance course can shorten the learning curve. It earns its cost only if you run enough prevailing-wage work to justify it. It is never a legal requirement.

Will QuickBooks do certified payroll?

This is the most common software question small shops ask, and the answers they get are muddy. One plumbing-business owner spent days with an Intuit sales rep who "tried to state that I need 4 different tiers" and, in the owner's words, "doesn't understand what he's selling." The honest version: QuickBooks can hold your pay data and export it. It does not classification-match or run per-hour fringe on its own. So the compliance-critical steps stay manual. Whether that is good enough depends on how many prevailing-wage jobs you run. The QuickBooks certified payroll spoke walks the Desktop vs. Online split. The certified payroll software comparison covers when a dedicated tool earns its cost.

What are the most common certified payroll mistakes?

Each of these has cost a real shop real money. Most are catchable in the same weekly workflow above. Misclassification and flat-weekly fringe drive the largest back-wage findings. Both compound quietly across every hour and every worker until an audit adds them up. The full breakdown, with the fixes, lives in common certified payroll mistakes.

Frequently asked questions

How do I do a certified payroll?

Pull the wage determination for your county and construction type. Classify each worker by the duties performed. Pay and record fringe per actual hour worked. Enter it all on the WH-347 and sign the Statement of Compliance. Submit it to the prime or agency within seven days of the pay date, and repeat every week the job runs.

What are the requirements for certified payroll in PA?

Pennsylvania has its own Prevailing Wage Act for state and local public works, separate from federal Davis-Bacon. A federally funded job in PA still uses the federal WH-347 certified payroll requirements. A state-funded job follows the PA Department of Labor & Industry's rules and forms instead. Confirm the funding source first — it decides which set of requirements applies.

Verify the rate before you pay