The Davis-Bacon Related Acts

By its own terms the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 reaches only contracts above $2,000 made directly by the federal government or the District of Columbia for construction. Most construction the federal government pays for is not contracted that way; it is funded through grants to states and cities, loans and loan guarantees, insurance, and other assistance. Over the following ninety years Congress wrote Davis-Bacon labor standards into the statutes that authorize that assistance. Those statutes are the Davis-Bacon Related Acts, and together with the Act itself they are what the Department of Labor abbreviates as DBRA. This page explains what they are and how they work; the mechanics of rates and payment are on the Davis-Bacon basics page.

What makes a statute a Related Act

A Related Act is any federal law that conditions federal assistance for construction on payment of Davis-Bacon prevailing wages. The condition is a provision applying Davis-Bacon labor standards, in the Act’s own terms of wages prevailing on similar projects in the locality as determined by the Secretary of Labor, to construction assisted under the statute. The Wage and Hour Division’s Fact Sheet 66 names the Federal-Aid Highway Acts, the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act as examples; its published workbook of current Related Acts, which lists the enactment date, the section, the public law, the Statutes at Large citation and the U.S. Code citation for each, begins with the Act itself, the Copeland Act and the Contract Work Hours and Safety Standards Act and continues through some sixty assistance statutes from the Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933 to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 and the CHIPS Act of 2022, several of them with more than one covered section.

The list shows how wide the reach is: public housing and HUD programs, hospitals under the Public Health Service Act, highways and transit, airports, clean air and clean water infrastructure, energy conservation and Energy Policy Act programs, Indian self-determination and housing programs, Head Start facilities, disaster relief under the Stafford Act, rail, Appalachian development, and Superfund response actions. Each Related Act was written separately, so the precise condition is in the statute’s own section, which the workbook cites; one entry, for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is marked expired.

How the standards attach

For a direct federal contract, Davis-Bacon coverage comes from the Act and the contract clauses the agency must insert under 29 CFR 5.5. For an assisted project, coverage comes from the Related Act, and the federal agency that provides the assistance is responsible for seeing that the recipient, which may be a state transportation department, a housing authority, a water district or a private developer, puts the same clauses and the applicable wage determination into the construction contract it awards. The regulations in 29 CFR part 5 apply to both; 5.1 states that the part coordinates enforcement under the Davis-Bacon Act and its Related Acts and points to the Wage and Hour Division’s website for the list of those laws, and 5.2’s definitions of agency, contract, contractor and the site of the work are written to reach federally assisted work. The contractor’s obligations are the same under either route: the weekly certified payroll, the posting, the overtime rule of the Contract Work Hours and Safety Standards Act, and the prohibition on kickbacks under the Copeland Act.

Enforcement is shared. The assisting agency reviews payrolls and investigates in the first instance; the Wage and Hour Division investigates on its own or by referral, and the remedies of withholding, back wages and debarment apply to Related Act work as to direct contracts, and Fact Sheet 66 gives the debarment period as three years. Where more than one federal agency assists the same project, the Department of Labor’s All Agency Memoranda explain how the agencies may share or delegate enforcement.

What the list does not settle

Whether a given project is covered is not answered by the list alone. The question turns on which program the money came through, what the Related Act’s own sentence says, and whether the work is construction, alteration or repair of a public building or public work within 29 CFR 5.2. The 2023 revision of part 5 added language on coverage of secondary construction sites and of certain delivery and installation work, parts of which a 2024 court injunction has blocked; the Wage and Hour Division’s Davis-Bacon page carries the current enforcement position. Those are questions for the assisting agency and the Department of Labor.

Related

The rates themselves come from the Wage and Hour Division’s surveys, described in how Davis-Bacon rates are determined, and are published on SAM.gov by county and construction type regardless of whether the project is a direct contract or an assisted one. For construction funded by a state or city without federal money, the state’s own law governs, if it has one; the state prevailing wage laws table shows which do, and the state profiles on this site show what construction trades are paid across all projects in each state.