About & methodology
Prevailing Wage Index is an independent, open index of the U.S. prevailing-wage system - state laws, federal Davis-Bacon determinations, and market wage context - with every binding number linked to its official government source.
Sources & methodology
- Davis-Bacon determination mirror: the U.S. Department of Labor's active wage determinations as published at SAM.gov, re-indexed daily (4,180 active). Each determination page carries the full official text verbatim (a U.S. government work, public domain) with its number, revision and retrieval date, plus a parsed rate table as a reading aid, and links to the official SAM.gov document. Determination text is never altered; the parsed table never replaces it.
- Service Contract Act index: active SCA determinations (1,498) indexed per state with locality coverage; text not mirrored - each links to SAM.gov.
- State law table: compiled from state statutes and state labor-agency pages, with each fact checked against two independent sources; last full verification 2026-08-12. Statute citations and agency links are on each state page. Corrections: email below.
- Wages: BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), private construction (NAICS 1012), average weekly wage by state - keyless public-domain API, quarterly. Approximate hourly is the weekly wage ÷ 40, a convenience conversion, not a reported figure.
- Explainers cite the governing law inline: 40 U.S.C. §§3141–3148, 29 CFR parts 1, 3 and 5, and DOL/IRS guidance.
Update cadence
The site rebuilds daily. The determination index and updates page refresh with each build (DOL publishes new revisions roughly weekly); QCEW updates quarterly (Q1 2026 currently); the state-law table changes only on verified legislative action.
What this site does not do
No forecasts, no advice, no invented or altered numbers - and it never presents an average wage as a prevailing-wage rate, or a parsed table as more than a reading aid for the official determination text.
Reuse
Our compiled datasets (CSV downloads) are free to reuse with credit and a link to prevailingwageindex.com. The underlying government data is public domain.