Certified Payroll & Prevailing Wage Reporting

It's a weekly report showing who worked on a publicly funded project, what classification they worked in, how many hours, and what they were paid — including how fringe benefits were satisfied. It comes with a statement of compliance signed under penalty of perjury attesting that the information is accurate and that workers were paid at least the required prevailing wage. The report is usually a condition of getting paid on the job. Read our full guide to how it works.

We submit them. That distinction matters more than it sounds — plenty of providers will generate a report and email it to you, which leaves the actual filing, the portal login, the rejections, and the resubmissions with your office. We file into LCPtracker, CCIP, and agency-specific portals, confirm the upload went through, and handle rejections and corrections when they come back.

Sometimes, but we'll be honest that it works considerably less well. Certified payroll has to match the payroll it describes, so if we're building reports from someone else's register we're reconciling to data we didn't produce and can't correct at the source. When something doesn't tie, the fix has to route through your other provider. We'd rather run the payroll and generate the reports from it. If that's not possible, let's talk about the specific setup.

One job is exactly where the risk is highest, because nobody in your office has done it before and the learning happens on a live filing. A contractor running public work continuously has usually built some muscle memory. A contractor on their first job is guessing at classifications and fringe credits with a signature attached. We set up first-time prevailing wage jobs regularly and it doesn't require changing how you handle the rest of your work.

We can review what was filed, prepare corrected payrolls, and calculate restitution where an underpayment occurred. What we can't do is tell you your legal exposure or represent you in a dispute — that's your construction attorney. What we can do is get the numbers right and the documentation organized, which is usually what an attorney needs first anyway. Finding it yourself is a much better position than having an auditor find it.

A determination typically sets a base hourly rate plus a fringe amount. You can generally satisfy the fringe portion by paying it as additional cash wages, by contributing to qualifying benefit plans, or by a combination — and each route reports differently. The common error is claiming an hourly fringe credit for a monthly premium without dividing by the hours actually worked, which overstates the credit and understates what the worker was owed. We calculate it rather than estimate it.

Usually yes. Prevailing wage terms in a prime contract flow down to subcontractors and lower-tier subs, so you can be fully subject to the requirements without ever dealing with the funding agency. General contractors also carry exposure for their subs' compliance, which is why GCs increasingly police sub payrolls closely and hold payment until they're right.

If they're performing covered labor on the project, generally yes — regardless of whether they take a wage or a draw. This is a frequent finding, because an owner swinging a hammer for two days doesn't feel like payroll and often isn't in the payroll system at all. Purely supervisory or executive time is treated differently. It's a fact-specific question, and one worth getting right before it's asked.

Yes, and it's the normal case for commercial contractors. Each project gets its own determination, its own payroll numbering sequence, its own submission destination, and its own documentation trail — while your crews move between jobs in the same week. Keeping those straight is most of the work, and it's why doing it inside the payroll process beats bolting it on afterward.

No to both. Bulverde Business Solutions provides payroll, certified payroll, bookkeeping, and financial operations services — not CPA, tax, or attest services, and not legal advice. Whether a project is covered, how a disputed classification should be resolved, and how a determination should be interpreted are legal questions for your attorney or the contracting agency. We prepare and file accurate reports and tell you plainly when a question has crossed that line.

Yes. Certified payroll is document work — determinations, registers, forms, and portal submissions — so there's no reason it has to happen locally. State prevailing wage rules vary, and we handle the state and agency requirements a given job carries. Everything runs through our secure client portal, and you get a person who answers the phone rather than a ticket queue.

A flat monthly price, quoted after we look at your crew size, how many prevailing wage projects you're running, how many portals are involved, and whether payroll and bookkeeping are in scope. Project count and portal count are the main drivers. We don't bill hourly and we don't meter phone calls — a contractor who won't call because the clock is running is a contractor we can't help.