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

§1What 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, a DOL-issued compliance record, 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 broken into regular and overtime hours, 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 qualifying benefit plan (health insurance, pension, apprenticeship funds) or by paying the cash equivalent directly to the worker. The form has separate entries for the fringe benefit credit and for 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 dated declaration on file, signed by the contractor, affirming the wage and hour figures are correct.

This is not a paperwork formality you can skip. The DOL can pursue fines, demand back wages, delay money owed under the contract, terminate the contract, and bar a contractor from federal work for as long as three years for violations, with debarment specifically triggered by things like failing to file weekly certified-payroll paperwork 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.

§2The free option: DOL's own WH-347 generator

Before paying for anything, look at what DOL now gives away. In December 2025 its Wage and Hour Division announced a browser-based, fillable edition of Form WH-347 plus an annotated guide to the form, and the Associated General Contractors of America reported the same release on December 16, 2025 [DOL announcement, Dec 2025; AGC News, Dec 16, 2025]. DOL describes the tool as running in a browser with no download or subscription and says it does not store your data on a server. You enter company and project details, each worker's hours, rates, and deductions, review the result, and print it or save it as a PDF for your contracting agency [DOL web tool page, 2026].

The form itself was revised in January 2025, and the current version carries an OMB expiration date of 01/31/2028, a date that Sunburst Software's support pages also flag for its own customers [DOL form page, 2026; Sunburst support page, 2026]. The previous revision carried an OMB expiration of 09/30/2026 [OMB filing for Form WH-347, 2024], a date that falls this month. Ask your contracting agency which layout it accepts, and ask each vendor whether its output matches the current one.

The free tool leaves out the jobs paid software is built for. DOL's description is a manual workflow: you type each week's hours, rates, and deductions in, then print or save the result. It generates the federal form, so whether your state accepts it or wants its own report is a separate check, and nothing in the description suggests it pulls hours from your payroll provider or files anywhere for you. For a subcontractor with one or two federal projects and a handful of workers, weekly manual entry is tolerable. Once you run several projects at once, or workers split time across classifications, the retyping is where errors creep in and where a paid tool starts earning its fee.

§3Why QuickBooks and generic payroll tools fall short here

Most small contracting crews 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 dedicated construction ERP systems, Foundation among them, were built to close, but Foundation's pricing lands somewhere between $500 and $1,500-plus every month, with the exact figure hinging on which modules you pick, plus implementation costs that typically run $3,000 to $8,000 on top, according to industry pricing guides. Sage 300 Construction and similar enterprise platforms sit in a comparable range. For an operation 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 only runs certified payroll a handful of weeks per project.

If your volume or company size does not match the under-20-employee profile this guide targets, our broader certified payroll software comparison covers QuickBooks Payroll Premium's built-in WH-347 report and LCPtracker for contractors running regular prevailing wage work across multiple states.

§4Affordable 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 payroll and HR platform aimed at building trades, and it does not appear to publish pricing on its payroll pages. Its own certified payroll page says it applies Davis-Bacon, state, and local prevailing wage rates by job location and classification, handles fringe credits and workers split across jobs, and generates WH-347 and state-specific reports directly from payroll data, with one-click submission to LCPtracker, eMars, eComply, and Elation Systems [Miter, 2026]. Third-party comparison sites quote figures such as $50 a month plus $6.50 per employee for an entry tier, while marketplace listings show $15 to $50 per user per month, so treat any of those as a reason to request a quote and not as a price. One structural point matters for a small crew: the certified reports come out of Miter's own payroll runs, so choosing it generally means moving payroll onto Miter and not bolting it onto the system you already have.

CertifiedPayrollPro works as an add-on and not as a payroll replacement: it takes a CSV export from whichever payroll system you run today (its site names UKG, Paycor, Paylocity, Rippling, and several others) and turns it into a WH-347 report. Its published pricing has a Starter tier at $49 a month plus $5 per report (up to 5 projects and 3 team members) and a Pro tier at $99 a month plus $3 per report (up to 25 projects and 10 team members), with a 14-day trial that includes three free reports [CertifiedPayrollPro pricing page, 2026, a vendor's own figures]. A contractor filing one report a week, roughly four or five a month, pays about $70 a month on Starter or about $112 on Pro, and the site also lists an Enterprise tier at $249 a month. This fits a subcontractor who wants to keep an existing payroll relationship and only add the compliance report.

Sunburst Software Solutions sells Certified Payroll Solution as a one-time licensed tool, not a subscription, which can suit a contractor who only takes prevailing wage work occasionally. Its pricing FAQ (last updated December 2023) lists $499 with a Wage Manager license included, and other current listings show a lower starting figure, so confirm on the order page. The catch is compatibility: Sunburst states the software works only with QuickBooks Desktop for Windows, not QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks for Mac [Sunburst support page, 2026].

eBacon and Points North are generally not the fit for the smallest contractors. eBacon does not publish pricing and quotes after a consultation; third-party estimates run from a few hundred dollars to about $1,000 a month, while a competitor's comparison page (CertifiedPayrollPro, so read it as marketing) puts mid-market platforms for this work at $150 to $500-plus a month depending on users, projects, and modules [SelectHub, 2026; CertifiedPayrollPro, 2026]. Points North sells Davis-Bacon reporting as a managed service, and as far as we could find it quotes prices per customer. Both push total cost toward the enterprise end this guide is trying to help small crews avoid.

§5Union 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 fringe credit and 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 single flat add-on, not a calculation broken out by classification and by plan, which is why the tools built specifically around Davis-Bacon compliance (Miter, eBacon, and the CertifiedPayrollPro report layer) put real engineering effort specifically into the fringe benefit credit math rather than treating it as an afterthought. A small crew 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.

Job costing and multiple pay rates per worker are covered in more depth in our construction-focused payroll comparison.

§6Frequently asked questions

What information does Form WH-347 require every week? It requires the crew member's name and ID number, trade classification, with hours split into straight time and overtime, the base hourly wage, the fringe credit amount or any cash paid instead of fringe, plus a signed Statement of Compliance certifying the payroll is accurate [U.S. Department of Labor, 2025].

Can a small-crew operation satisfy Davis-Bacon fringe benefit obligations with cash instead of a benefit plan? Yes. Davis-Bacon's fringe requirement can be met entirely in cash wages, entirely through bona fide fringe benefit plans, or through a mix 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 the $49-a-month starter tier on the CSV-based add-on covered above or Miter's quote-based pricing [FOUNDATION pricing guide, foundationsoft.com, 2026].

Is there a free way to produce a WH-347? Yes. The Department of Labor released an online, fillable WH-347 generator in December 2025 that runs in a browser, needs no subscription, and lets you print or save the finished form as a PDF. You enter hours and rates by hand each week, so it fits a small crew with a couple of federal contracts better than one juggling many at once [DOL, 2026].

Do certified payroll reports need to go through the same payroll provider a contractor already uses? Not necessarily. One of the CSV-based add-ons covered above is built to accept an 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 [vendor product pages, 2026].

What is the best payroll platform for a construction company? It depends on whether your jobs fall under Davis-Bacon prevailing-wage rules. For general W-2 payroll with no prevailing-wage obligations, Gusto or ADP RUN cover the vast majority of crews. Once WH-347 or a state-level certified-payroll report enters the picture, an ordinary payroll app alone will not cut it, you need a full construction accounting platform like Foundation for high volume, a platform built for the building trades like Miter that runs payroll and certified reports together, or a CSV-based add-on that works from your current provider's export, as covered above.

What software do most companies use for payroll? ADP remains the most widely used payroll provider overall. Usage-tracking data puts its share of the HRM systems category at roughly 8.6%, ahead of any single competitor [Hudson Labs, 2026]. The market stays fragmented past that, though, Paychex, Gusto, and Paylocity each hold meaningful chunks, so being the most-used platform does not mean it is the best fit for the small crews this page targets.