What are prevailing wage requirements and how do I track them?

Prevailing wage laws require contractors working on government-funded construction projects to pay workers at least the wage rates established for their specific trade and location. These rates include both a base hourly wage and fringe benefits. The goal is to ensure public projects don’t undercut local wage standards.

For contractors in Michigan, the federal Davis-Bacon Act is the primary prevailing wage law you’ll encounter. Michigan repealed its state-level prevailing wage law in 2018, but Davis-Bacon still applies to any project receiving federal funding. This includes highway work, public buildings, bridges, and other infrastructure projects funded wholly or partially by federal dollars.

Tracking starts with your payroll system. You need the ability to assign different pay rates to the same employee based on which project they’re working on. An electrician might earn their normal rate on a private job and a higher prevailing wage rate on a federal project, sometimes in the same week. Your payroll setup must handle this without manual intervention every pay period.

Certified payroll reports are the core compliance requirement. You submit these weekly to the contracting agency, documenting every worker on the project, their classification, hours worked, wages paid, and fringe benefits. The reports are signed statements certifying accuracy under penalty of perjury. Getting these wrong isn’t just an administrative issue. It’s a legal one.

Job costing becomes essential when you have prevailing wage projects mixed with regular work. Every hour worked on a covered project needs to be tracked separately. Construction bookkeeping for prevailing wage jobs requires more granular time tracking than typical residential or commercial work. Workers need to record not just total hours but hours by project and by classification if they perform multiple types of work.

Fringe benefits add another layer of complexity. Prevailing wage rates include a fringe component that you can satisfy through actual benefits like health insurance and retirement contributions or through additional cash wages. You need to track what you’re providing and document that it meets or exceeds the required fringe rate for each classification.

Keep meticulous documentation. Store certified payrolls, time records, and proof of fringe benefit payments for at least three years after project completion. Audits happen, sometimes years after the work is done. Recreating records from memory doesn’t work.

The penalties for non-compliance range from back wages and liquidated damages to debarment from future federal contracts. Intentional violations can result in criminal prosecution. This isn’t an area where close enough counts.

Most contractors handling their first prevailing wage project underestimate the administrative burden. The work itself might be familiar, but the reporting requirements are significantly more demanding than standard payroll. Macomb County bookkeepers who work with construction clients can help you set up systems that capture the right data from day one, which is much easier than trying to reconstruct it at the end of a project when certified payrolls are due.