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The Davis-Bacon Act, as amended, requires that each contract over $2,000 to which the United States or the District of Columbia is a party for the construction, alteration, or repair of public buildings or public works shall contain a clause setting forth the minimum wages to be paid to various classes of laborers and mechanics employed under the contract. Under the provisions of the Act, contractors or their subcontractors are to pay workers employed directly upon the site of the work no less than the locally prevailing wages and fringe benefits paid on projects of a similar character. The Davis-Bacon Act directs the Secretary of Labor to determine such local prevailing wage rates. For more background information, please refer to the "Davis-Bacon Wage Determinations Reference Material".

Database Search

You can search the Davis-Bacon database for Wage Determinations. By using one or more of the options below you can limit your search results and obtain more relevant and specific results to your query.

Select A State:

This option allows you to choose one of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, or the Virgin Islands. By selecting one of these States you limit your results to wage determinations pertaining just to that one State.

Choose (AND, OR, NOT):

AND restricts a search when two specific terms are known. For instance, the query orange AND highway returns only documents that contain both words.

OR is the default operator for the WAIS server. The query orange OR highway (or, alternatively, orange highway) returns documents containing the word "orange," the word "highway," or both.

NOT rejects documents that contain specified words. For example, the query orange NOT highway returns documents that contain the word "orange" but do not contain the word "highway."

Select A Construction Type:

You can choose a specific type of construction to limit your search: Building, Residential, Highway, or Heavy.

Refine your query:

In the text box, you can enter keywords such as county names, wage numbers, construction types, dates, etc. Refining your query in this manner allows you to get results specific to your query. If you know the name of the county, you can enter that and get a list of wage determinations affecting only that county. You can also use Boolean operators in the text box. In addition to AND, OR, and NOT, you may also use ADJ.

The asterisk (*) may be used to truncate words in a query in order to expand a search within a specified range.

Examples:

If you wanted wage determinations for Meade County, KY you would choose Kentucky in the Select A State box and type meade in the Refine your query box.

If you wanted a wage determination pertaining to Calvert County and NOT to Charles county the query calvert NOT charles will return all determinations that contain Calvert and NOT Charles.

If you wanted a wage determination that affected both Jasper and Shelby Counties you would use the query: jasper AND shelby to get a list of determinations that pertain to both counties.

Limit To:

This option allows you to limit the number of wage determinations the search will return. You can limit it to 5, 10, 50, or 100.

Bold Search String in Wage Determination:

Clicking “YES” will put any query terms from the Select A State, Select A Construction Type, and/or Refine your query text box in bold type so that you can see them more easily in the actual text of the wage determination. Clicking “NO” will not put any query terms in bold.

To limit your search to particular dates:

This option allows you to limit the date range of the wage determinations. You can enter a date range with From and To dates to get a list of determinations within that range of dates. You can also enter a cut-off date and choose ON, BEFORE, or AFTER.   "ON" returns only wage determinations published on that date. "BEFORE" returns wage determinations published before that date. "AFTER" returns wage determinations published after that date.  Be sure to enter your date in the mm/dd/yyyy format.

After you have entered any limiting terms, dates, etc. you can click the “Davis-Bacon Search” button to perform the search, or you can click the “Reset” button to clear all entered data.

Search By Determination Number:

 If you already know the wage determination number, you can enter it in this search box. If you know only part of the determination number, the asterisk (*) may be used to truncate it. When constructing a truncated query, try to include as many characters of the determination number as possible in order to reduce the number of irrelevant documents returned. Note: Truncation may not be used for prefixes.

Examples:

MD010034 (Most accurate)

MD01*

MD*

After you have entered the wage determination number, you can click the “Search by Determination Number” button to perform the search, or you can click the “Reset” button to clear any entered data.

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Browse Feature

Browse wage determinations by state:

Clicking on a state name will bring up a table, organized alphabetically by county name, of wage determinations for four different kinds of construction: Building, Heavy, Highway, or Residential. You can click on a wage determination number to pull up the text file of that particular determination.

View a table of next week’s determination numbers (or “general decision numbers”):

The table of next week’s determination numbers lists determination numbers in the left-hand column, but it will not link to the text of those determinations until it becomes the active list of determination numbers for the week. The table is organized alphabetically by state, and then numerically by determination number within each state. The modification number for each determination, listed in the middle column, is zero. This will not change until the modifications have been made and the items move to the current week’s table. The right-hand column lists the publication date of each determination.

Browse a table of the current week’s modifications by determination:

The table of the current week’s modifications has modification numbers in the middle column. The left-hand column has direct links to the text files of the determinations listed. The determinations are organized by state and determination number, and the right-hand column lists the publication date of each determination.

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Sample Searches (7)

The following sample searches are provided as guides to general types of searches in the Davis-Bacon databases. Unless otherwise indicated, the sample searches are performed in the 2001 Davis-Bacon database. For the sake of space, only the top three hits in each results list are included with each example below.

Note: The results of these sample searches are described as they appear on the Web interface. The display of the results may vary for users of the WAIS client and SWAIS software.

State | Construction Type | Keyword | Date | State and Construction Type
Determination Number | Multiple Searching Methods

1. Search by State

This type of search returns determinations that are related to a specific state. Use the pull down menu to select the state you wish to search. Searching only by state will return determinations containing results related to all construction types.

Last updated:  June 17, 2002
Page Name:  http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/davisbaconhints.html