Prevailing wage
A prevailing wage is the minimum hourly rate and fringe benefits that must be paid to workers on certain public construction projects, set by government determination for each trade and locality.
Also written as Davis-Bacon, prevailing wage rate.
Last updated
Reviewed by Eric Collin · President and Founder of Firmo Construction, 20+ years in preconstruction and bid evaluation
On federal work the requirement comes from the Davis-Bacon Act, and many states have their own equivalents covering state and local projects, sometimes at different thresholds. The determination is published by classification and locality, and it sets a floor rather than a market rate.
The cost impact is substantial and it is not a uniform percentage. Prevailing rates can exceed open-shop rates significantly in some classifications and localities and barely at all in others, so a rule of thumb applied across trades will be wrong in both directions.
This is one of the sharpest sources of a non-comparable field. A bidder that priced at prevailing wage and one that priced at its standard rates have submitted numbers that are not in the same units, and the difference is large enough to reorder the whole tab. Whether the project is covered, and whether each bidder priced it that way, has to be confirmed rather than assumed.
Compliance also carries administrative cost that belongs in the estimate: certified payroll reporting, apprenticeship ratios in some jurisdictions, and record retention. A bidder unfamiliar with public work often prices the wages and not the paperwork.
- Qualifications
Qualifications are the conditions and assumptions a bidder attaches to its price — the circumstances under which that number holds.
- General requirements
General requirements are the Division 01 specification sections that set the administrative and procedural rules of a contract — submittals, meetings, closeout, quality control, and site conduct.
- Sales tax on materials
Sales tax on materials is the tax owed on construction materials, whose treatment varies by state and by project and is a common source of inconsistent bids.
Catch every gap before you award
MyLevelBid reads every bid line by line, maps them to one scope, and flags what nobody carried.
Request a demo