Employer guideRead at source, 3 September 2026

Prevailing Wage by State: Davis-Bacon Thresholds, State Rules and What Contractors Must Pay (2026)

Federal Davis-Bacon prevailing wage attaches to federally funded construction contracts over $2,000, a threshold indexed to nothing. On top of that, 28 states and the District of Columbia run their own law, and the trigger points are nothing like each other: $1,000 in California and Rhode Island, $500,000 in Colorado, $1,000,000 in Connecticut, and no dollar threshold at all in seven states. Twenty-two states have none, and three forbid their own cities from adopting one. The table below carries every jurisdiction with its threshold, its certified payroll cadence and its statute. It was rebuilt from the statutes, because the published summaries — including the federal government own state-by-state page — are wrong in both directions.

The federal floor: a threshold indexed to nothing, a definition rewritten in 2023

40 U.S.C. 3142 requires laborers and mechanics on federally funded or assisted construction contracts in excess of $2,000 to be paid the locally prevailing wage and fringe benefits the Secretary of Labor determines. Around sixty Related Acts push the same requirement out to federally assisted work, which is how a water plant or a housing rehabilitation is covered without being a federal contract. The Service Contract Act does the same for services over $2,500; the Contract Work Hours and Safety Standards Act adds overtime above forty hours on prime contracts over $100,000.

One detail matters more than it looks. Section 3142(a) puts the obligation in the advertised specifications: the advertisement must state the minimum wages for each class of laborer and mechanic, and 3142(c)(2) requires the scale posted at the site. The rate is published before anyone is hired, which is the number a job ad for that project has to match.

What counts as prevailing was rewritten recently. 29 CFR 1.2, amended at 88 FR 57723 on 23 August 2023, is a three step test: the rate paid to a majority in the classification; failing a majority, the rate paid to the greatest number provided that number is at least 30 percent; failing that, a weighted average. The 30 percent step is the restored part, and it pulls determinations toward collectively bargained rates wherever union density sits between a third and a half. A Federal Register search on 3 September 2026 found no substantive Davis-Bacon rulemaking since. The paperwork rule, 29 CFR 5.5(a)(3), requires records kept three years past completion and certified payrolls filed weekly.

Prevailing wage by state: who has a law and what triggers it

Tennessee counts only narrowly: since 1 January 2014 its act reaches state highway construction only. Of the twenty-two states with no law, three go further than silence. Arizona bars agencies and political subdivisions from requiring it, Utah bars the state and every subdivision from requiring predetermined rates except where federal law compels it, and Indiana forbids a public agency to set a wage scale for contracts awarded after 1 July 2015. In those three a city cannot opt in; in Virginia a locality expressly can, by ordinance, so the answer there turns on the county as much as the state.

Seven states apply their law at any contract value: Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Texas, Washington, and Tennessee within its highway scope. In between the poles sit figures like Ohio $101,201 for road work and New Jersey $19,375 for municipal contracts, both of which move on a schedule and both of which go stale in published summaries within a year of moving.

Compiled 3 September 2026 from state codes and labor department publications, checked against the statute where retrievable and the administering agency otherwise. Repeal years for Alabama and Kansas rest on secondary sources; current absence from those codes was confirmed directly. Ohio adjusts thresholds on 1 January of even numbered years and the figures shown are the ones the Department of Commerce currently publishes; we could not retrieve a dated 2026 notice.

The published summaries are wrong, and the federal one is the worst

The obvious place to look this up is the Department of Labor state-by-state prevailing wage page, revision stamped 1 January 2023 and still the leading government result. Read against the statutes on 3 September 2026 it is wrong in at least five places. It lists Michigan as repealed, when Public Act 10 of 2023 took effect 13 February 2024 with no threshold. It puts Texas and Washington under states with no prevailing wage law; both have one, and in both the right entry is not a dollar figure but no threshold at all. It gives Tennessee a $50,000 highway threshold, a figure that was the pre-2014 building threshold. And it gives New Jersey $16,263 for municipal contracts, correct until the five yearly adjustment took it to $19,375 on 1 July 2024.

The mirror image is more instructive. Connecticut labor department guidance in circulation puts the new construction threshold at $400,000. The statute does not: C.G.S. 31-53(h)(1), read in the General Assembly own text on 3 September 2026, exempts new construction below $1,000,000 and remodeling, rehabilitation, alteration or repair below $100,000. The $400,000 figure survives from before the 2017 change. So the federal page understates Connecticut coverage and the state guide overstates it. One of those errors costs money and the other costs a bid, and the rule they leave is unglamorous: near a threshold, the governing number is in the statute, not in a table, and that includes this one.

The repeal wave stopped, and then it reversed

For four decades the direction was one way: nine states let their acts go between 1979 and 1988, Oklahoma act fell to a court in 1995, and a second wave took Indiana (2015), West Virginia (2016), Kentucky, Arkansas and Wisconsin (2017) and Michigan (2018). Of the nine early repeals only two trace to a repealing instrument we could read, New Hampshire effective 13 July 1985 and Louisiana effective 27 June 1988; the other seven years come from secondary compilations, though the absence from those codes is verifiable and we verified it.

Since 2019 it has reversed three times. Colorado enacted at $500,000 effective 1 July 2021 and began publishing its own rates in place of federal ones on 1 January 2022. Michigan undid its own repeal in February 2024, with no threshold at all. And Virginia enacted at $250,000 with a local opt in — where one clause shows how contested the federal definition has become, because it requires the method of determination to be consistent with 29 CFR 1.2 as of 20 January 2026. Virginia adopted a snapshot of the federal definition on a named date, which is what a legislature writes when it expects the federal text to move.

Certified payroll is where the compliance cost actually lands

The threshold decides whether you are in. Certified payroll decides what being in costs every week for the length of the job, and it is the column published comparisons almost never carry. Federally it is uniform: weekly, records kept three years past completion. At state level, six jurisdictions want it weekly, Alaska wants it every second Friday and filed with the Department itself rather than passed up to the prime, Maryland gives fourteen days and charges $10 a calendar day when you miss, and Oregon withholds 25 percent of payment until the monthly filing lands.

The outliers matter because a process built for one fails everywhere else. Missouri takes records once at the end with a sworn affidavit and pays nothing final until it arrives. Montana asks for nothing until somebody complains, then gives you five days. Texas, Vermont and Wyoming require no filing at all. Michigan now takes it online, direct to the state, not the contracting agent.

Compiled 3 September 2026 from state statutes and agency instructions. Where the two disagree, as in Maine, the stricter is shown.

What a wage determination does to your job ad

Davis-Bacon puts the wage in the advertised specifications and requires the scale posted at the site, and every state law above works the same way: the determination issues before the work is advertised. So when the job reaches a recruiting ad there is a right number and a wrong number. Two failure modes recur: advertising the base rate when the determination is base plus fringe, which understates the package and puts the ad below a competitor who advertised correctly; and advertising the shop rate for a role only sometimes on public work, so the ad is right for four jobs out of five and wrong for the covered one.

Both matter, because the wage line is the highest leverage line in a frontline job ad. In our 2026 social job advertising benchmark, apply rate explains roughly 70 percent of the variation in cost per applicant, and cost per applicant runs from $2.91 at the tenth percentile to $66.45 at the ninetieth, median $13.88. That spread is not a media buying gap; it is mostly whether the offer in the ad is one a qualified person wants to click, and on public work the offer has already been determined for you. So pull the determination for the classification and the county, add the fringe, and advertise that. See also what makes a good job ad, pay transparency laws by state and overtime laws by state.

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