How to Extract Data from a Certified Payroll Report (WH-347)

If you review certified payroll for a federal or federally assisted construction project, the slow part is not the math, it is reading dozens of WH-347 forms from subcontractors and re-typing every worker, classification, hour, and wage rate into a tracking spreadsheet. This guide explains what a certified payroll report contains, which WH-347 fields matter for Davis-Bacon compliance, and how prime contractors and agency compliance teams extract the data off a received report into structured rows they can audit, instead of keying each one by hand.

What is a certified payroll report?

A certified payroll report is a weekly record of every worker's hours, classification, wage rate, fringe benefits, and deductions on a federal or federally assisted construction project, signed under a statement of compliance certifying the wages meet the required prevailing rate. Contractors and subcontractors covered by the Davis-Bacon and Related Acts must submit one each week the crew is on site. The U.S. Department of Labor's optional Form WH-347 is the standard format, and most agencies and prime contractors accept or require it.

What information is on a WH-347 form?

The WH-347 captures, for each worker on the project that week: name and an individual identifying number, work classification, hours worked each day with the total for straight time and overtime, the hourly rate of pay, gross amount earned, deductions (FICA, withholding, and others), and net wages paid. Two columns carry the prevailing-wage detail that auditors check first:

• Column 6A: the hourly wage rate actually paid for straight time and overtime. If the worker was paid above the wage determination, the rate paid goes here.
• Column 6B: the fringe benefit credit, meaning the contractor's contributions to or anticipated cost of bona fide fringe benefit plans being credited toward the prevailing fringe rate.

The form also carries a signed statement of compliance on the back, naming the signer and certifying that the payroll is correct and that the listed fringe benefits were paid.

What changed on the 2025 WH-347 form?

The Department of Labor released an updated WH-347 effective January 2025 and valid through January 2028. The new version separates funded from unfunded fringe benefits, adds clearer apprenticeship documentation, folds the old WH-348 statement of compliance into the same form, and makes both gross wages and net pay required fields. The previous WH-347 remains valid until September 30, 2026, so during the transition compliance teams receive both layouts and have to read each correctly. That is exactly the kind of format variation that breaks template-based data entry.

Why do you need to extract certified payroll data?

Prime contractors are responsible for the certified payroll of every subcontractor under them, so a general contractor on a Davis-Bacon job collects WH-347s from each sub every week, checks the wage rates against the applicable wage determination, confirms the classifications match the work, and flags underpayments before they become a compliance finding. Agency labor-compliance officers do the same across many primes. Doing that review means getting the numbers off the form and into a system where they can be sorted, totaled, and compared, week over week, against the wage determination.

How do you extract data from a certified payroll report?

To extract data from a certified payroll report, upload the WH-347 PDF or scan to a document data tool, let it read each worker row into structured fields (name, classification, daily hours, rate, gross, deductions, net, and the fringe columns), review the values it flags, and export the result to Excel or your compliance system. The manual alternative is typing each row; on a large job with many subs that is hours a week of pure data entry. The structured steps:

1. Collect the week's WH-347 submissions from each subcontractor, however they arrive (PDF, scan, photo).
2. Run them through construction document processing software that reads the form into rows rather than treating it as a flat image.
3. Confirm Column 6A rates meet or exceed the wage determination for each classification.
4. Check Column 6B fringe credit and the gross-to-net math line up.
5. Export the clean data to your tracking spreadsheet or labor-compliance platform.

Because DocuOCR reads the layout, not a fixed template, it handles both the 2025 form and the legacy version subcontractors are still sending during the transition, plus the variations that show up when a sub uses payroll software that prints its own certified report instead of the federal form.

Can you automate certified payroll review?

You can automate the data-capture and arithmetic checks of certified payroll review, but the compliance judgment stays with a person. The extraction step removes the re-keying, and rule checks (rate below determination, missing fringe, hours that exceed a reasonable week) can be flagged automatically. Whether a classification is correct for the work performed, or whether an apprentice ratio is met, is still a reviewer's call. The point of automating the data pull is to spend the compliance hour on judgment, not on transcription.

What is the difference between certified payroll and regular payroll?

Regular payroll pays your workers; certified payroll proves to a government agency that you paid them the prevailing wage required by the contract. Agencies on the receiving end of those filings run the same reading problem in reverse, which is what government document processing software handles, and our guide on extracting data from government forms walks through reading standardized agency paperwork. A certified payroll report carries extra detail regular payroll does not surface to anyone outside the company: the work classification tied to a published wage determination, the split between base rate and fringe credit, and a signed statement of compliance with legal weight. The data lives in your payroll system, but the WH-347 is the formatted, certified extract a Davis-Bacon contract requires you to submit every week.

Pulling certified payroll into a spreadsheet without re-keying

For a compliance team reviewing many subcontractors, the highest-leverage fix is to stop typing. Our certified payroll OCR reads each received WH-347 and returns the worker rows as structured data you export to Excel or your compliance platform, so the reviewer checks values instead of transcribing them. It is the same extraction approach that powers our AIA pay application OCR for the rest of the draw package, and it fits naturally alongside how teams already process retainage on an AIA G702 and G703 and read a schedule of values. Certified payroll, pay applications, and the schedule of values are all the same problem: structured numbers trapped in PDFs that someone is paying a person to re-type.

Subcontractor compliance rarely stops at payroll. Teams that track certified payroll usually also chase certificates of insurance and signed compliance paperwork from the same subs, so pairing extraction with certificate of insurance tracking software keeps the whole compliance file current, and groups that route approved progress payments often connect the certified amounts into accounts payable automation so the numbers post without a second round of data entry.