About This Site — A Readable Davis-Bacon Prevailing Wage Reference

This site is a readable, always-current reference for Davis-Bacon prevailing wage rates. It lists the base rate plus fringe, broken out by county, trade, and construction type, next to plain-English certified-payroll guides. It exists for one reason: the official data is real and public, but slow to read. We take the same numbers the government publishes, present them as clean dated tables you can scan, and link every figure back to its source so you can check it yourself. It is built for the people who have to get a bid or a payroll right: contractors, estimators, and payroll admins.

Why this reference exists

The federal wage data is free, public domain, and genuinely hard to use. SAM.gov serves Davis-Bacon wage determinations through a search app (a React single-page interface) and downloadable PDFs. There is no clean per-classification table you can read at a glance. To pull a single electrician fringe rate, you search the portal, open a multi-page determination, and read down a PDF. That is workable for a lawyer with time; it is slow for an estimator pricing a job by Friday. We built this site after running that lookup one too many times. The numbers were always there. The readable, dated, quotable version was not, so we made it.

What we do — and what we don't

What we do: copy the exact figures from official determinations, show the WD number and effective date beside each rate, and explain the certified-payroll rules (fringe per hour worked, the WH-347, base versus fringe) in language a busy bookkeeper reads once. What we do not do: originate rates, estimate a "typical" number, or tell you what to pay on your specific job. This is an educational reference, not a determination and not advice. Before you bid or pay, verify the current wage determination on SAM.gov or with the DOL Wage and Hour Division.

Our standards: accuracy, freshness, honest sourcing

Three rules govern every page. First, accuracy: no figure is guessed or averaged into a "typical" rate. Each one is copied from an official record and cited. Second, freshness: we re-sync against SAM.gov every week and stamp each page with the date we last pulled it. A rate we confirm is wrong gets pulled or flagged within 24 hours. Third, honest sourcing: every rate links to its determination and every legal rule links its regulation, so you can re-run our check instead of taking our word for it. The full method is written down. Read how we source rates for the provenance chain and our editorial process for how we verify and correct. The county data itself lives under prevailing wage rates.

Who runs this site

An editorial team maintains the data and the guides. We do not claim a roster of named experts we do not have. Money and legal pages are meant to carry a second read from a credentialed certified-payroll or prevailing-wage professional. Where that review has happened, the page names the reviewer and their credential under Reviewed by. Where it has not, this page included, the page shows an "reviewed by our editorial team per our editorial process" notice and a [TBD] reviewer slot. We would rather show the real state of a page than paper over the gap with a fabricated byline. That honesty is the standard here, not the exception, and it is the reason to trust a number before you rely on it.