PunchCertified Payroll and Prevailing Wage: The Davis-Bacon Guide for Small Construction Crews (2026)
Certified Payroll and Prevailing Wage: The Davis-Bacon Guide for Small Construction Crews (2026)
The short answer: If your crew works on a federally funded construction contract over $2,000, you owe the local prevailing wage plus fringe benefits, and you must file a certified payroll report every week. The report lists each worker, their classification, the exact hours they worked each day, their rate, and their pay, and you sign it under penalty of perjury. The whole thing stands or falls on one input: an exact, day-by-day record of hours by worker. That is precisely what Punch captures every time a crew punches in.
A public school reroof. A sidewalk repair funded by a federal grant. A water-main job on a municipal contract. The day you win work like this, you enter a different payroll world. The wages are set for you, the paperwork is weekly, and the penalty for sloppy records is real money and sometimes a suspension from future bidding. This guide lays out what certified payroll and prevailing wage actually require, then shows how to make the reporting almost boring.
What Prevailing Wage Means
The Davis-Bacon Act, on the books since 1931, sets a floor on what you pay laborers and mechanics on federal public-works jobs. It applies to contracts over $2,000 for the construction, alteration, or repair of public buildings and public works. On those jobs you cannot pay your own hourly rate. You pay the prevailing wage for each worker's classification in that county, as determined by the U.S. Department of Labor, and that figure is usually higher than an open-market rate.
Two numbers make up a prevailing wage: a basic hourly rate and a fringe benefit rate. You satisfy the fringe portion one of two ways. You either pay into bona fide benefit plans on the worker's behalf, or you pay the fringe amount to the worker as cash on top of their hourly rate. Most small crews without a formal benefits program pay it in cash. Either way, the fringe is not optional, and it shows up as its own line on your report.
Federal law is not the whole picture. Roughly 30 states plus the District of Columbia have their own prevailing-wage statutes, often called Little Davis-Bacon laws, that apply to state and local public works. Each one sets its own dollar threshold, its own forms, and its own filing cadence. Some kick in far below the federal $2,000 mark. Some use a dual threshold, such as one figure for new construction and a lower one for repair work. Before you bid a public job, confirm which law governs it and what its threshold is with the awarding agency.
What Certified Payroll Actually Is
Certified payroll is a weekly report proving you paid every worker at least the required prevailing wage. On federal jobs the standard form is the Department of Labor's WH-347. Using that exact form is optional. Submitting the information is not. You can build your own format, but it has to carry the same data.
For each worker, each week, the report shows their name, their work classification, the number of hours they worked on each day of the week split into straight time and overtime, their hourly rate, the fringe rate or the cash paid in lieu, gross pay, deductions, and net pay. It rides with a signed Statement of Compliance, an attestation that the payroll is correct and that everyone was paid the required rate. The signature is under penalty of perjury and must be in ink.
Read that requirement list again and notice how much of it is time data. Classification tells you which rate applies. The daily hours tell you the straight-time and overtime split. Get the hours wrong and every downstream number on the form is wrong too. This is why certified payroll punishes crews that still track time on paper or memory. A guessed punch is a false certification waiting to happen.
The Weekly Rhythm and the Records Behind It
Certified payroll is not a monthly chore you catch up on. On a Davis-Bacon job you file the report within seven days after each pay date, for every week any covered work happened, until the job is done. Miss a week and you are out of compliance even if every worker was paid correctly.
Behind the weekly filing sits a recordkeeping duty that outlasts the job. Davis-Bacon basic records, including each worker's classification, rates, daily and weekly hours, deductions, and actual wages paid, must be kept for three years after the project is finished. If an investigator asks two years later how many hours a specific person worked on a specific Tuesday, you need an answer that came from a timestamp, not a reconstruction.
That is a hard standard to hit with a spreadsheet a foreman fills in at the end of the week. It is a simple standard to hit when every punch was recorded the moment it happened, tied to the job, and stored where you can pull it later. The report is only as trustworthy as the raw hours, and the raw hours are only trustworthy if they were captured in real time.
Where Punch Fits
Punch does not file your WH-347 for you, and it should not claim to. Prevailing wage determinations, classifications, and the certification itself are yours to own. What Punch owns is the layer everything else is built on: the exact, per-job, per-worker hours that make the report true.
Every punch in Punch is tied to a job site. When a crew moves from a public-works site to private work in the same day, they punch out of one and into the other, or a manager splits the shift afterward, so hours sort themselves by job instead of getting lumped into one daily total. That separation matters on prevailing-wage jobs, where only the covered hours carry the prevailing rate, and mixing them is a classic audit finding.
The hours themselves are captured to the minute. Punch records punch in, punch out, and lunch, and keeps the daily breakdown that a certified payroll report demands. It applies the right overtime rules for your state, so the straight-time and overtime columns are already split the way the form wants them. Owners and managers approve the week before anything becomes payroll, which is your chance to catch a missed punch before it becomes a signed, sworn number. When the week closes, you export the hours to QuickBooks or Excel and carry them straight into your certified payroll and your pay run.
Verification here is a geofence, not a camera. Punch confirms a punch against the job-site location when you turn geofencing on, and it never photographs your crew or runs facial recognition. On a public job where you are already documenting everything, the last thing your people need is a lens in their face at every punch. A location check does the job and respects the crew.
Because Punch keeps the record, the three-year retention rule takes care of itself. The hours are stored, tied to the job, and pullable long after the ribbon is cut.
What This Costs You in Punch
Nothing extra. Prevailing-wage tracking in Punch is the same tracking you would use on any job. Job sites are a configuration feature, not a billing line, so a crew running three public contracts at once adds three job sites and pays no more. Pricing is flat per organization, owners are always free, and every plan includes every feature. Overtime presets, geofencing, split shifts, approvals, and the exports that feed your certified payroll are never locked behind a higher tier. Compare that to per-user time-tracking tools, where the seat count on a big public job is exactly when the bill spikes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who has to file certified payroll?
Any contractor or subcontractor performing laborer or mechanic work on a covered federal or federally assisted construction contract over $2,000 files weekly certified payroll. Many state and local public works trigger the same duty under state prevailing-wage laws, often at lower thresholds. If you are unsure whether a job is covered, ask the awarding agency before the first shift.
Is the WH-347 form mandatory?
No. The WH-347 is the Department of Labor's optional form. You may submit the required payroll information in your own format, but it must contain the same data: worker, classification, daily and weekly hours, rate, fringe, gross, deductions, and net, plus a signed Statement of Compliance.
How do fringe benefits work on a certified payroll report?
The prevailing wage has a basic rate and a fringe rate. You meet the fringe obligation by paying into bona fide benefit plans, by paying the fringe amount to the worker as cash, or by a mix of both. The report shows the fringe credit or the cash-in-lieu separately from the base hourly rate.
Does Punch fill out my WH-347?
No, and be wary of any tool that says it does the whole thing for you. Punch captures the exact per-job, per-worker hours and the straight-time and overtime split that the report is built on, and exports them for payroll. The prevailing-wage rates, classifications, and the certification stay in your hands, where they belong.
How long do I keep the records?
Davis-Bacon basic payroll records must be kept for three years after the project is completed. Because Punch stores every punch tied to its job site, that retention is automatic rather than a filing cabinet you have to maintain.
Getting Started
Setting up prevailing-wage-ready time tracking in Punch takes about fifteen minutes:
- Create your organization and invite your crew by email or join code.
- Add each public job as its own job site, with an address and a geofence radius.
- Set each worker's classification and rate, and pick your overtime preset.
- Choose weekly or biweekly pay periods and approve hours before every pay run.
- Export to QuickBooks or Excel and carry the exact daily hours into your certified payroll.
The 14-day free trial starts at signup, no credit card required. Win the public work, and let the hours behind your certified payroll be the part you never have to worry about.