Anyone who bids federally funded construction in the US runs into Davis-Bacon wage determinations. Each one is a long text document on SAM.gov listing every craft (electricians, laborers, operators and so on) with a base hourly rate and a fringe rate for a given state, set of counties and construction type.
Estimators usually open the determination, scroll through dozens of classifications and retype them into a spreadsheet. When a modification is published, they do it again.
What a wage determination contains
- Construction type: Building, Heavy, Highway or Residential. The same county can have four different determinations.
-
Rate identifiers: each rate block is tagged as a union rate (the identifier starts with the union's code), a survey rate (
SU...) or a union average (UAVG...). That tells you where the number came from. - Modification number and effective date: rates change when a new modification is published, so the mod number matters as much as the WD number.
Doing it by hand
- Go to
sam.gov, open Wage Determinations, and search Davis-Bacon by state, county and construction type. - Open the active determination and note the WD number and modification.
- Copy each classification, base rate and fringe into your sheet.
- Re-check the determination named in the contract documents before bid day.
Doing it in one run
I packaged the lookup and the parsing as an Apify Actor: Davis-Bacon & SCA Prevailing Wage Determinations. Search by state, county and construction type, or give it exact WD numbers. Each output row is one classification with craft, rate, fringe, rateIdentifier and effectiveDate, ready to export to Excel or CSV. No SAM.gov account or API key is needed.
A caution worth repeating
The determination that governs a job is the one incorporated in the contract, not whatever is current on the day you look. Use a pulled sheet to build the estimate quickly, then confirm the WD number and modification against the bid documents.
Top comments (0)