Certified Payroll Software for Small Subcontractors: Affordable WH-347 Compliance Under 20 Employees

What WH-347 and Davis-Bacon certified payroll actually require

If you are a subcontractor on a federal or federally assisted construction project, the Davis-Bacon and Related Acts require you to pay laborers and mechanics no less than the locally prevailing wage for the type of work performed, and to prove it every single week. That proof takes the form of Form WH-347, the Department of Labor's certified payroll report, or an equivalent report that captures the same data. The form itself is available directly from the DOL at dol.gov/agencies/whd/forms/wh347, and it requires far more detail than a standard pay stub.

Each weekly submission needs the worker's name and an identifying number, their job classification, hours worked broken out by straight time and overtime, the basic hourly rate, and a separate accounting of fringe benefits. The prevailing wage is defined as the basic hourly rate plus fringe benefits, and a contractor can satisfy the fringe portion either by paying into a bona fide benefit plan (health insurance, pension, apprenticeship funds) or by paying the cash equivalent directly to the worker. Column 6B on the WH-347 tracks the fringe benefit credit and Column 6C tracks any cash paid in lieu of fringe, and each figure has to reconcile against hours worked times the applicable hourly credit. Every payroll also needs a signed Statement of Compliance certifying the numbers are accurate.

This is not a paperwork formality you can skip. The DOL can pursue civil penalties, require back wage payments, withhold contract payments, terminate the contract, and debar a contractor from federal work for up to three years for violations, with debarment specifically triggered by things like failing to submit certified payrolls weekly or keeping incomplete records. For a subcontractor running a five-person crew, a single missed or wrong weekly report on a public school or municipal water project can put the whole contract at risk.

Why QuickBooks and generic payroll tools fall short here

Most small subcontractors already run their books on QuickBooks or a generic payroll processor like Gusto or ADP RUN, and for straight W-2 payroll that works fine. The problem shows up the moment a job requires certified payroll. QuickBooks has no native concept of a prevailing wage determination, no field for fringe benefit credit versus cash in lieu, and no built-in WH-347 template that reconciles hours, classifications, and fringe math the way the DOL expects. Contractors end up rebuilding the report by hand in a spreadsheet every week, pulling hours from one system and wage determinations from another, then hoping the numbers tie out.

The job costing gap compounds the problem. Certified payroll only makes sense when hours are tracked by project and by prevailing wage classification (a laborer and an operating engineer on the same crew can have very different prevailing rates for the same hour), and generic payroll tools were not built to split time that way. A worker who moves between a private job and a Davis-Bacon job in the same week needs those hours segregated correctly, or the certified report will misstate the prevailing wage obligation even if gross pay is technically correct.

This is exactly the gap that construction-specific ERP systems like Foundation Software were built to close, but Foundation pricing runs roughly $500 to $1,500 or more per month depending on modules, plus implementation costs that can add another $3,000 to $8,000, according to industry pricing guides. Sage 300 Construction and similar enterprise platforms sit in a comparable range. For a subcontractor with fewer than 20 employees and maybe one or two prevailing wage jobs a year, that is not a rounding error, it is a meaningful chunk of overhead for a company that may only need certified payroll a handful of weeks per project.

Affordable tools built for small contractors

A few products now specifically target the gap between "QuickBooks with a spreadsheet bolted on" and "$500-a-month construction ERP."

Miter is a construction-focused payroll and HR platform priced per user, generally in the $15 to $50 per user per month range depending on modules, rather than a flat enterprise license fee. It handles Davis-Bacon and state prevailing wage rates, calculates fringe benefits, generates WH-347 and state-specific certified payroll reports, and can submit certified payroll directly to state portals in states including California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts. For a small crew, the per-user pricing model scales down naturally instead of forcing a company-wide platform fee.

CertifiedPayrollPro is built specifically as an add-on rather than a full payroll replacement: it takes a CSV export from whatever payroll provider you already use, ADP, Gusto, QuickBooks, Paychex, Paylocity, Rippling, Paycor, and generates the WH-347 from it. Its starter tier runs about $49 a month plus a per-report fee of roughly $1 to $5, meaning a contractor filing one certified payroll a week lands around $70 a month total, with Pro and Enterprise tiers at $99 and $249 a month for higher volume. This matters for a subcontractor who wants to keep their existing payroll relationship and just needs the compliance report layered on top.

Sunburst Software Solutions offers Certified Payroll Solution as a one-time licensed desktop tool, with pricing starting around $499 for the license rather than a recurring subscription, which can suit a contractor who only takes on prevailing wage work occasionally and does not want an ongoing monthly bill.

eBacon and Points North / Payroll4Construction are worth knowing about but are generally not the fit for the smallest contractors: eBacon's feature-based pricing has been reported starting around $1,000 per feature per month, and Points North's certified payroll reporting is often sold as a managed service with custom quotes rather than transparent self-serve tiers, both of which push the total cost closer to the enterprise end of the spectrum this guide is trying to help small subcontractors avoid.

Union fringe benefit reporting adds another layer

For subcontractors whose crews are union or whose Davis-Bacon obligation is met partly through fringe benefits rather than cash, the reporting gets more complicated still. The contractor has to track contributions to each bona fide plan (health and welfare, pension, apprenticeship, vacation) separately, convert those contributions into an hourly credit rate per worker per classification, and make sure the WH-347's Column 6B fringe credit and Column 6C cash-in-lieu figures actually reconcile with what was paid into the plans and what hours were worked. If a worker's classification changes mid-week, or they split time between a union scale job and a non-union job, the fringe calculation has to follow them.

Generic payroll software has no mechanism for this at all, it just processes gross pay. Even some construction payroll tools treat fringe as a flat add-on rather than a per-classification, per-plan calculation, which is why the tools built specifically around Davis-Bacon compliance (Miter, eBacon, CertifiedPayrollPro's report layer) put real engineering effort specifically into the fringe benefit credit math rather than treating it as an afterthought. A small subcontractor evaluating any of these tools should ask directly whether the fringe calculation supports multiple concurrent benefit plans and cash-in-lieu splits, because that is where manual spreadsheet processes break down fastest and where DOL audits tend to focus.

Frequently asked questions

What information does Form WH-347 require every week? It requires each worker's name and identifying number, job classification, hours worked broken into straight time and overtime, basic hourly rate, fringe benefit credit or cash paid in lieu of fringe, and a signed Statement of Compliance certifying the payroll is accurate [U.S. Department of Labor, 2025].

Can a small subcontractor satisfy Davis-Bacon fringe benefit obligations with cash instead of a benefit plan? Yes. The prevailing wage obligation can be met entirely in cash wages, entirely through bona fide fringe benefit plans, or through a combination of the two, as long as the total meets or exceeds the wage determination [U.S. Department of Labor, Fact Sheet #66, 2025].

What happens if a contractor fails to submit certified payroll correctly? Consequences can include civil penalties, required back wage payments, withheld contract payments, contract termination, and debarment from federal contracts for up to three years, with the Department of Labor citing failure to submit weekly certified payrolls as a specific ground for debarment action [U.S. Department of Labor, Investigative Procedures and Remedies on Davis-Bacon Contracts, 2025].

How much does enterprise construction accounting software like Foundation cost compared to smaller tools? Foundation Software pricing has been reported in the roughly $500 to $1,500+ per month range depending on modules, with implementation adding another $3,000 to $8,000, well above per-user or per-report pricing models like Miter's roughly $15 to $50 per user per month or CertifiedPayrollPro's $49-per-month starter tier [FOUNDATION pricing guide, foundationsoft.com, 2026].

Do certified payroll reports need to go through the same payroll provider a contractor already uses? Not necessarily. Some tools, such as CertifiedPayrollPro, are designed to accept a CSV export from existing providers like ADP, Gusto, QuickBooks, Paychex, or Rippling and generate the WH-347 from that data, so a contractor does not have to switch payroll systems just to add certified payroll reporting [CertifiedPayrollPro, 2026].