What is certified payroll? The Statement-of-Compliance Test

Every page ranking for this search was written by a company that sells payroll software, with one exception: the California Department of Industrial Relations. We checked the first page of results on 24 August 2026. Seven of the eight organic results were vendor content, all of it recent and none of it wrong, and every one of them presented Form WH-347 as the certified payroll form.

The Department of Labor says otherwise, on its own instructions page, in a sentence most of those guides skip: “While use of Form WH-347 itself is optional…”

That gap is the reason this page exists. Below is what certified payroll actually requires, quoted from the primary sources with the dates we read them, and then a test you can run against your own payroll tool in about five minutes. We call it the Statement-of-Compliance Test, because the signed statement, not the form, is the thing the law actually asks for.

One thing to be straight about first, because it changes how you should read the rest. We test payroll and HR software on real accounts we pay for; we have never filed a certified payroll on a public-works job. This page is a careful reading of the Labor Department’s own instructions and California’s, quoted and dated, not a war story from a jobsite. Where the law is quoted you can check us against the source. Where a judgment call is ours, we say so. And for anything specific to your contract or your state, your contracting officer and your attorney outrank this page and every other one on the results list.

What certified payroll is

Certified payroll is a weekly report proving that workers on a public-works job were paid the locally prevailing wage. It is filed per project, per week, for each laborer and mechanic on the site.

The trigger is a dollar figure. The Department of Labor states that the Davis-Bacon and Related Acts “apply to contractors and subcontractors performing on federally funded or assisted contracts in excess of $2,000 for the construction, alteration, or repair (including painting and decorating) of public buildings or public works” (dol.gov, read 24 August 2026). That threshold has not moved in decades, which means in practice almost any federally funded construction contract is covered.

The weekly obligation comes from two places, and it is worth knowing both because they answer different questions. The Copeland Act, 40 U.S.C. § 3145, requires contractors to “furnish a statement on the wages paid each employee during the prior week.” The regulation that says where to send it, 29 CFR 5.5(a)(3)(ii), requires weekly submission to the federal agency if that agency is a party to the contract, or otherwise to the applicant, sponsor or owner who maintains the records and passes them to the agency that provided the federal money.

That second branch catches people out. On a grant-funded municipal project, the federal agency may never be your counterparty. You still file weekly, just to someone else.

The form is optional. The statement is not.

Here is the DOL sentence in full, from the WH-347 instructions:

“While use of Form WH-347 itself is optional, covered contractors and subcontractors performing work on Federal or federally assisted construction contracts are required by the DBRA regulations and the contract clauses to submit payroll information on a weekly basis.”

What is mandatory is the content and the certification. Each weekly submission must be accompanied by a signed Statement of Compliance, which DOL describes as “page 2 of the WH-347 or another document with identical wording.” On that statement, boxes 1, 2, 3 and 6 always have to be checked.

Two more boxes are conditional, and they are where small contractors trip. Box 4 is the apprentice box: if anyone is being paid as an apprentice in the period it must be checked, with each program named and marked as registered with the Department’s Office of Apprenticeship or with a State Apprenticeship Agency. If it does not apply, DOL wants “Not Applicable” or “N/A” written in, not a blank. Box 5 is the fringe benefit credit box: check it if you are claiming credit for contributions to bona fide benefit plans, and note that credit for an unfunded plan, one where you provide the benefit directly, requires prior approval from the Department of Labor under 29 CFR 5.28. Claiming that credit without the approval is a quiet way to end up owing back wages.

This matters commercially, not just pedantically. If your payroll or construction software exports a certified payroll file that is not a WH-347, that is not automatically a problem. And if it exports a beautiful WH-347 but cannot produce a valid signature, it has failed at the part that is actually required.

On signatures, the instructions are unusually specific: “Legally valid electronic signatures are acceptable… Photocopies or scanned copies of signatures do not satisfy this requirement.” The print-sign-scan-email routine that a lot of small contractors run every Friday does not meet the standard. An e-signature process that verifies the signer’s identity does.

One more detail with teeth: “workers’ full Social Security numbers must not be included.” You use the last four digits or another individual identifier. A tool that dumps full SSNs onto a submitted report is creating a problem, not solving one.

The Statement-of-Compliance Test

Marketing pages say “certified payroll reporting” freely. The test below comes straight from the WH-347 field instructions, so it is checkable rather than arguable. Run one week of one project through your software and look for six things.

1. Work classification per worker, with a separate row per classification. Electrician, laborer, operator, not job title. If someone worked in two classifications in one week, DOL requires “a separate row for each labor classification,” and the penalty for not keeping that breakdown is expensive: without it, the worker “must be paid for all hours worked using the highest applicable prevailing wage rate.” A tool that stores one rate per person cannot produce this. The form also wants each worker marked “J” for journeyworker or “RA” for registered apprentice, with the apprentice’s level of progression.
2. Hours split between straight time and overtime, by project and by day. Not a weekly total.
3. Fringe benefits, split two ways. The obligation can be met through contributions to bona fide plans, through cash paid in lieu, or through a mix, and the form keeps those in different columns: the hourly credit claimed for plans, and the cash in lieu. A tool that reports one blended fringe figure has already failed this line.
4. Gross earned on all work that week, next to gross earned on this project. This is the field most tools miss. The DOL instruction is explicit: if part of a worker’s week was earned on other projects, “including non-DBRA covered projects,” the total for all work that week goes in its own column. A single-project report cannot produce it.
5. Itemised deductions. And note the constraint that goes with them: except for deductions listed in 29 CFR 3.5, every deduction needs prior approval from the Department of Labor.
6. A legally valid electronic signature, and no full Social Security numbers.

Miss one and the answer is no. That is the whole test. It takes longer to read than to run.

We are not going to tell you which tools pass. We test payroll and HR products on real accounts and publish the method we use, and on 24 August 2026 the vendor documentation we needed to check this specific capability returned 403 to us. Rather than guess, we have given you the test we would have run. If you want the general shape of the buying decision instead, our guide to picking payroll software around your hardest constraint treats union and certified payroll as constraint number five, and says the same thing this page says at greater length: if you need it, your shortlist is a different shortlist.

Federal is not the whole story

Ask an AI assistant what certified payroll is and it will answer federally, then ask you a question. Google’s own AI Overview on this search ends with: “tell me if your project is federal or state-level (such as in California), and I can give you the exact threshold and reporting rules.”

It asks because the answer genuinely splits, and because almost nothing on the results page covers the state side. California is the one exception in the top ten, and it is instructive.

The California Department of Industrial Relations states that “contractors and subcontractors on most public works projects are required to submit certified payroll records (CPRs) to the Labor Commissioner using DIR’s Public Works Website Services,” with a few categories of project exempt from online reporting (dir.ca.gov, page dated May 2026, read 24 August 2026).

Two things follow, and neither appears in the vendor guides we read.

California does not want your WH-347. It wants CPRs through its own portal, and for file uploads it publishes a CPR XML schema, version 1.3. That is a machine format, not a PDF. So a tool that “supports certified payroll” in the sense of printing a federal form may still leave you keying data into a state portal by hand.

California certified payroll records are public. DIR runs a CPR Public Search: “payroll records are available to the public using the CPR Public Search. Confidential information has been removed.” Federally, your submissions go to the contracting agency. In California, assume competitors, workers and journalists can read them.

Multiply that by the number of states running their own prevailing-wage statutes and the picture is clear enough. There is no single certified payroll form, and the one everybody names is the optional one.

If you are not in California, the question to take away is not “which form” but who receives it and in what format. Ask the awarding body two things before your first pay week: which agency or portal receives the reports, and whether they accept the federal form, a state form, or a file upload against a published schema. Getting that answer in week one costs one phone call. Getting it in week six costs a re-filing of every week you have run.

Three rules you may still be reading about have been struck down

Research Davis-Bacon in 2026 and you will find a lot of commentary on the 2023 final rule. Some of it describes provisions that no longer exist.

Three provisions of that rule were challenged in the Northern District of Texas: the distinction between material suppliers and contractors codified at 29 CFR 5.2; the requirement to pay prevailing wages to delivery truck drivers for more than de minimis onsite time; and the provision at 29 CFR 5.5(e) applying the Acts by operation of law where a contracting agency left the clauses out of a covered contract.

They were preliminarily enjoined nationwide on 24 June 2024. Then, on 24 June 2026, a federal court vacated all three. The plaintiff, the Associated General Contractors of America, announced it that day: “A federal court has vacated three provisions of a 2023 Davis-Bacon rule challenged by AGC of America and its co-plaintiffs.” Trade coverage the next day reported that the Department of Labor did not oppose the motion for final judgment.

Now the part that is worth more than the ruling itself. On 24 August 2026, two months after that judgment, the Labor Department’s own pages still describe the 2024 preliminary injunction and still state that the three provisions “may not be implemented or enforced at this time.” We captured both pages that day, and that is what they said.

For your jobsite the outcome is the same either way, since the provisions are not being enforced under either status. For your paperwork it is not the same at all. An injunction is a hold that can be lifted; a vacatur takes the rule off the books. If someone tells you those three provisions might come back next quarter, they are working from the agency’s page rather than from the judgment.

There is a general lesson in that gap, and it is the reason this page dates every source it quotes. Quoting a government source accurately is not the same as being current. Both matter, and they can diverge for months at a time. Where we find that gap, we say so and date both sides rather than picking whichever is more convenient.

This is a summary of published government text and one court outcome, not legal advice. Where a figure appears here, it appears because we read it on the agency’s own page on the date shown.

If your tool fails the test

Failing is normal, and it is not a knock on the tool. What ordinary payroll software is built to do is calculate withholdings, move money and file tax forms on a monthly and quarterly rhythm. Certified payroll asks for per-project classification on a weekly rhythm, submitted to a party that is not the tax authority. Those are different products that happen to share a word.

Three honest routes, in increasing order of cost. Add a construction-specific reporting layer on top of the payroll you already run; which tools actually produce a valid certified payroll, and who chooses them, is its own shortlist. Move to a payroll product that treats certified payroll as a first-class feature and verify it with the six-point test before you sign. Or keep the reports manual and price the hours properly, which is a real answer for a contractor with one covered job a year.

Whichever way you go, price it before you commit. Our payroll and HR pricing index tracks published rates by vendor with the date each was captured, our round-up of payroll tools that automate the pay run covers the automation layer, and if the bookkeeping side is what actually hurts, payroll and accounting integration is its own decision with its own costs. For teams starting from nothing, we also keep a list of payroll tools with genuine free tiers and where each free tier stops.

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Sources. Read 24 August 2026: U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, instructions for Form WH-347 (OMB Control No. 1235-0008, expires 31 January 2028); the Davis-Bacon and Related Acts construction page; the Davis-Bacon rulemaking page. California Department of Industrial Relations, Certified Payroll Reporting (page dated May 2026). On the vacatur: Associated General Contractors of America, “Court Vacates Key Davis-Bacon Rule Provisions,” published 24 June 2026, and Construction Dive, 25 June 2026, for the Department’s decision not to oppose. Statutory and regulatory citations as given on the agency pages: 40 U.S.C. § 3145, 29 CFR 5.5(a)(3)(ii), 29 CFR 5.5(e), 29 CFR 5.28, 29 CFR 5.2, 29 CFR 3.5.