How to Read a Davis-Bacon Wage Determination (Field by Field, With a Real Example)

A Davis-Bacon wage determination is a rate table. Learning how to read a wage determination comes down to matching three things to your project — its county coverage, its construction type, and the worker classification — then reading two numbers off that one row: a base cash rate and an hourly fringe rate. Add them and you have the minimum total you owe that worker for every hour on the job. Everything else on the page (the WD number, the modification date, the superseded line) tells you whether you are holding the right table and the current version of it. Read the wrong construction type or an outdated modification and every paycheck on the job is wrong before you write it.

What is a wage determination?

The Wage and Hour Division (WHD) issues these determinations under the Davis-Bacon Act and its related acts. The DOL Prevailing Wage Resource Book defines a wage determination as "the listing of wage rates and fringe benefit rates for each classification of laborers and mechanics which the WHD Administrator has determined to be prevailing in a given area." Two words do the work. Area means a specific county, or set of counties. Classification means the trade — electrician, laborer, cement mason — not the person's job title on your crew.

The determination is a floor, not a suggestion. Once it goes into a federal or federally assisted construction contract, each classification's base rate and fringe rate become contract terms, enforced through the labor standards clauses at 29 CFR 5.5. Underpay against a row and you owe back wages. Do it enough and you face debarment. The document lives on SAM.gov, which replaced the old WDOL.gov and beta.SAM systems as the single official source.

What does a wage determination include?

Every general determination splits into two parts: a header block that identifies the document, and a classification schedule that lists the money.

The header block, at the top, carries:

• The general decision number, also called the wage determination number or WD number, e.g. TX20250012.
• The superseded determination number, the older document this one replaces.
• The state and the county coverage (the counties the determination applies to).
• The construction type: building, residential, highway, or heavy.
• A modification table: the modification number and publication date of each revision.

The classification schedule below it is the rate table, sometimes called the classification list. Each entry opens with an identifier line (a union-local code or an SU survey code, plus a date). Below it sit one or more classification rows. Each row shows the classification name and two money fields: the Rates column (the base hourly cash wage) and the Fringes column (the hourly benefit). You add the base rate + fringe columns to get the total hourly prevailing wage.

That is the whole anatomy. The skill is not memorizing the parts. It is matching your project to the right document and reading the right row, which the next section does line by line.

How to read a Davis-Bacon wage determination, line by line

This is how to read a wage determination in practice. Here is a general Highway determination in the exact layout SAM.gov publishes. The dollar figures below are formatted to match a real determination; your project's live numbers will differ, so always pull the current WD from SAM.gov rather than copying these. What matters is that every field sits where it sits on the real document. To test figures in the meantime, try our fringe calculator.

Read it top to bottom:

Line 1 — General Decision Number: TX20250012, dated 01/03/2025. This is the document's ID and the date this version published. It is the number you write on your certified payroll and the one an auditor uses to confirm you paid the right table.

Line 2 — Superseded General Decision Number: TX20240012. The determination this one replaced. If your contract locked in the older TX20240012, you keep using it. The superseded line is a breadcrumb showing the lineage, not an order to switch.

State and Counties. Texas; Travis and Williamson Counties. One determination often covers several counties that share a rate. If your jobsite county is not on this list, this is the wrong document. Go back to SAM.gov and pull the right one.

Construction Type: Highway. This single line decides which of four rate tables you are holding. Roadwork rates are not building rates. Read the wrong type and every rate below is wrong.

Modification Number 0, 01/03/2025. Modification 0 is the original issue. Each later revision increments this number, and the publication date next to it is what determines whether it reaches your contract.

Classification rows. The identifier ELEC0520-004 starts with a craft-and-local code. That marks a union rate, adopted from a collective bargaining agreement. The identifier SUTX2022-013 starts with SU, a survey rate WHD set from its own wage survey. Read across the electrician row: base $32.15, fringe 12.48. The total prevailing wage is $44.63/hr. A common laborer is $15.10 base + $4.85 fringe = $19.95/hr. You owe the total, delivered as cash wages plus qualifying fringe (see how fringe is owed per hour worked).

Read across one row: the identifier prefix tells you union or survey, and base plus fringe is the total wage you owe per hour.

For a second concrete total from a published source: the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency's "How to Read a Wage Determination" guide walks a row where the base is $35.68 and the fringe is $22.30, a total of $57.98/hr. Same arithmetic, real numbers.

What does the WD number mean?

The WD number format is not random; it encodes where and when. A general decision number like TX20250012 reads in three chunks:

So TX20250012 is the twelfth general determination issued for Texas in 2025. A California one might read CA20250034; a Florida heavy determination, FL20250007. The year in the number is the issue year. It does not change when the document is later modified. A determination first issued as TX20250012 keeps that number through Modification 1, 2, 3 and beyond. The modification number and its publication date, listed separately in the header, tell you the version.

Reading the number wrong is a common misfile. Contractors treat the four-digit year as a currency date and assume a 2024-numbered determination is stale. It is not stale if it is still the current, un-superseded document on SAM.gov for that county and construction type. Check the superseded line and the modification date, not the year embedded in the ID.

General wage determinations vs project wage determinations

The general vs project determination split is the next thing to check, and you almost always use the first.

A general wage determination is the standing, published rate table for a construction type in an area, revised as rates change and posted on SAM.gov. It has no expiration date and applies to any covered contract in that area until DOL modifies or supersedes it. The Highway example above is a general determination.

A project wage determination is issued for one specific project when no general determination covers the needed area or classification. The contracting agency requests it from DOL on Standard Form SF-308 (29 CFR 1.5), and DOL issues rates for that project. A project WD is valid for 180 calendar days from issue unless it is used in a contract within that window. So if a determination is tied to a single named project rather than a standing county table, confirm it has not expired before you rely on it. If you found your rates by searching a county and construction type on SAM.gov, you are reading a general determination.

The four construction types — and what breaks when you read the wrong one

Every Davis-Bacon determination is scoped to exactly one of four construction types, and picking the building/residential/highway/heavy schedule is the read that governs every rate below it. The DOL construction-type definitions (All Agency Memoranda 130 and 131) draw the lines like this:

Heavy is the residual bucket: if a project is not clearly building, residential, or highway, it is heavy. Some determinations further split heavy into subtypes (e.g. "heavy — water and sewer line construction").

Now the cost of error. The four types are separate rate tables. The same classification often carries different base and fringe numbers across them. Read the building schedule for a job that is legally highway construction, and you pull the wrong figure for every worker. Sometimes it reads low. Then you accrue back wages on every hour of every classification for the life of the job. DOL restitution is figured per worker, per hour, per week, so one wrong-type read compounds fast. Sometimes it reads high. Then you overbid the labor line and lose the job to a contractor who read it right. Reading the wrong schedule is a classic certified payroll error.

Practitioners treat this as a bid-time decision, not a payroll one. As one contractor put it on a compliance thread: "You should have already picked the classification of the workers when bidding the work. How do you price the work without that? You add the rate and the fringe and you have your number." The construction type is the fork above the classification. Pick it wrong at bid, and every rate below it is wrong too. When a job spans two types (a building with an access road), the work is split, and each portion is paid from its own determination. Still deciding which schedule governs? Start at the prevailing wage rates hub and drill to the county.

SU rates vs union rates

The SU vs union rate question is answered by the identifier line above each classification, and it is a one-glance read. An identifier that starts with a craft-and-local code, such as ELEC0520-004 or PLUM0100-005, is a union rate adopted from a collective bargaining agreement. It updates when that CBA updates, which is why union rows can change on a determination the moment a new agreement takes effect. An identifier that starts with SU, such as SUTX2022-013, is a survey rate (SU = survey) that WHD set from its wage survey of the area, with the state and the survey year following the letters.

Both are equally binding. The prefix does not change what you owe. It only explains where the number came from and hints at how often it moves: union rows track contracts, SU rows track periodic surveys. Do not skip the identifier line. It is also what pins each rate to a source if an auditor asks where your figure came from.

How modifications and superseded dates work

Rates change mid-lifecycle, and this is where readers get burned. The header carries two version signals — the modification number and the superseded line — and you have to know which version your contract is locked to.

A modification is a revision to an existing determination that keeps the same WD number. The header's modification table lists each revision and its publication date:

The determination in effect at bid opening locks your contract for its term (29 CFR 1.6). Later modifications reach you only through a new contract or option.

One rule governs it (29 CFR 1.6). The determination and modification in effect at bid opening control the contract, and they stay locked for the contract's term. A modification DOL publishes the week after your bid opening does not reach your awarded contract. A modification's publication date is its effective date for new solicitations. There is one timing edge: a modification published fewer than 10 days before bid opening may not apply if the contracting officer finds there was not enough time to notify bidders. Later modifications reach you only through a new contract, an exercised option year, or certain extensions.

Read the timeline above. If your bid opened on 05/01/2025, your contract is locked to Modification 1 (published 04/18/2025). Modification 2, published 07/03/2025, does not change what you owe on that contract, even though it is now the newest version on SAM.gov. A worker doing the same job on a contract you bid in August is on Modification 2, at whatever numbers it carries. Two crews, same trade, same county, two lawful rates. They are locked to different modifications.

The superseded line handles the bigger break. When DOL retires a determination entirely and issues a replacement, the old one points to the new number, and the new one names the superseded predecessor. The same lock-in logic applies: your contract keeps the determination it incorporated. The mistake to avoid is grabbing "the latest one on SAM.gov" for a running job when your contract is locked to an earlier modification or a superseded WD. Match the number and modification your contract named, then read that document. When you reconcile a subcontractor's certified payroll, confirm their WD number and modification match the contract's before you accept a rate (see the certified payroll guide).

How to get a wage determination

You pull determinations yourself from SAM.gov, free, no account required to search. The path:

1. Go to sam.gov/wage-determinations.
2. Choose the act: DBA (Davis-Bacon, construction) rather than SCA (Service Contract Act). This DBA vs SCA determination choice picks the right ruleset before anything else.
3. Filter by state, then county, then construction type (building, residential, highway, or heavy).
4. Open the matching general determination and confirm the county appears in the header and the construction type matches your work.
5. Note the WD number, the current modification number, and its publication date. Those three go on your records.

If your contract already incorporated a determination, do not re-pull a newer one and assume it applies. Read the number the contract named. SAM.gov is the source of record. A rate from a GC's email or an old PDF is a copy to verify, not the authority. For a county-level rate reference broken out by trade and construction type, with the governing WD number and effective date shown, a leaf like the Harris County, TX electrician rate page reads faster than the raw document, and the certified payroll calculator turns base + fringe into what you actually pay.

When your worker's exact task is not listed: conformance

Sometimes the work a person performed has no matching row. The determination lists an electrician and a laborer, but your worker ran a specialized piece of equipment with no listed classification. You do not get to pick the closest cheap row instead.

The fix is a conformance: an additional classification and rate, requested on Standard Form SF-1444 under the contract clauses at 29 CFR 5.5. The contractor, the workers, and the contracting agency propose a classification and a rate that bears a reasonable relationship to the rates already on the determination. WHD approves or adjusts it. Until a conformed rate is approved, do not guess. A worker parked in a lower-paid listed classification for work that warranted its own rate is a classic back-wage finding. Community threads describe this exact trap: a worker "performs higher-paid work but stays in a lower-paid classification," and the underpayment surfaces in the audit. If the row does not exist, conform it. Do not force the work into a row that does not fit.

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