Certified payroll is a weekly compliance filing required of contractors and subcontractors working on federally funded construction projects under the Davis-Bacon Act. The same framework — sometimes called "prevailing wage payroll" — applies to most state-funded public-works contracts under "little Davis-Bacon" laws.
The filing itself is the U.S. Department of Labor's WH-347 form. Each row certifies, under penalty of federal perjury, that every worker on the project was paid at least the prevailing wage for the work classification they performed, that fringe benefits were paid as required, and that no kickbacks were taken. The form goes to the contracting agency every week the work is in progress.
Who has to file certified payroll?
Any contractor or subcontractor on a federally funded project worth more than $2,000 — the original Davis-Bacon threshold — has to file. State and municipal projects vary by jurisdiction; California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Massachusetts all carry their own variants, with prevailing wage thresholds typically in the $25,000–$1,000,000 range depending on the project type.
In practice, this means most commercial electrical, mechanical, security, fire-alarm, low-voltage, and roofing contractors working on schools, hospitals, courthouses, military installations, transit projects, public housing, and federally backed affordable-housing projects file certified payroll for every pay period the work is in progress.
What's on the WH-347
Each WH-347 row carries: the worker's name, a unique identifier (typically the last four of their SSN), their work classification per the project's wage determination, hours worked per day for the pay period, total hours, hourly base rate, fringe rate, gross earnings, deductions, and net pay. The classification matters most — the same technician working as an electrician on Monday and a foreman on Tuesday gets paid two different prevailing rates, and certified payroll has to reflect that.
Below the rows, the contractor signs a Statement of Compliance affirming that the work classifications and wage rates match the project's wage determination, that fringe benefits were paid in cash or to bona fide plans, and that no unauthorized deductions were taken.
Why it eats weekends
The pain is structural. Most contractors carry their day-to-day labor in a service like ADP, Gusto, or QuickBooks Payroll, none of which are built for prevailing-wage compliance. Each pay period, a bookkeeper exports the hours, looks up the wage determination, manually classifies each worker against the project's classifications, calculates the prevailing rate plus fringe per technician per task, types the WH-347, and signs the Statement of Compliance.
On a typical mid-size commercial contractor with one or two prevailing-wage projects active, this is a multi-hour task per pay period. On a contractor running multiple OCIP or CCIP projects with multiple wage determinations and multi-classification crews, certified payroll becomes a multi-day filing — usually pushing into the weekend, usually with the bookkeeper quietly hating Mondays.
OCIP and CCIP — the layer above
Owner-Controlled Insurance Programs (OCIP) and Contractor-Controlled Insurance Programs (CCIP) layer additional reporting on top of certified payroll. Workers' comp class codes per technician have to be tracked separately, EPLI and GL exposure has to be mapped to project type, and the GC's compliance team typically asks for labor reports broken out by classification on demand.
OCIP-eligible labor reports separately from non-OCIP labor in the same payroll cycle. The audit trail has to survive a Department of Labor visit and a GC compliance review simultaneously.
How Forge handles it
Treasury — the payroll drawer of Forge — carries certified payroll as a native module. Davis-Bacon wage determinations pull per project. Prevailing wage is calculated per technician per task at the rate for the work classification, not the operator's home classification. The WH-347 generates signed and ready to file. OCIP/CCIP-aware reports generate from the same ledger.
Charter operators on prevailing-wage-heavy verticals — security/fire and electrical — report 11–15 minutes per pay period for filings that previously took multi-day cycles. The audit trail is automatic because the data is automatic; the bookkeeper stops dreading Mondays because Mondays stop costing a day.
The compliance burden doesn't move — the law is the law. What moves is the tooling that makes the law followable.