How to Fill Out and Submit the Pennsylvania Certified Payroll Form (LLC-25)

Pennsylvania’s Certified Payroll Form LLC-25 is a weekly report that contractors and subcontractors on public works projects submit to the public body that awarded the contract, showing that every worker was paid the prevailing wage. You complete one form per week for the life of the project, list each worker’s hours, classification, wages, deductions, and fringe benefits on the front page, and sign the Certified Statement of Compliance on the back. A blank copy is available from the Department of Labor and Industry’s prevailing wage page at pa.gov.

When You Have to File LLC-25

The Pennsylvania Prevailing Wage Act covers construction, demolition, alteration, and repair work performed under contract with public funds when the total estimated project cost exceeds $25,000.¹ “Public body” includes state agencies, counties, municipalities, authorities, and school districts that receive state funding. Routine maintenance falls outside the Act even on public property.

The $25,000 threshold looks at the whole project, not your slice of it. A subcontractor with $8,000 of electrical work still files LLC-25 if the overall project exceeds $25,000. Both the prime contractor and every subcontractor submit their own forms directly to the awarding public body.²

Pull the Wage Rates Before You Start

You cannot fill in the form correctly without the prevailing wage determination for your county and trade. The Department of Labor and Industry publishes rates through its online portal at dliweb.pa.gov/prevwage, broken out by heavy, highway, and building construction and varying by region.³

Also review the “Notes as Referenced in Predeterminations” documents from the Bureau of Labor Law Compliance. Those notes define the tasks that belong to each job classification for the region and follow the custom and usage of the construction industry.³ Getting classification right is where many contractors get tripped up. Reporting a worker as a laborer when the actual duties match an electrician’s classification is one of the violations the Bureau investigates most often.

Completing the Front Page

LLC-25 is two pages. The front captures payroll for the week; the back is the Certified Statement of Compliance.

Project and Contractor Header

The top block asks for the project name, project location, your firm’s name and address, and the name of the awarding public body. Enter the week-ending date for the pay period being reported. Because the header stays constant, most contractors build a template they reuse each week.

Row-by-Row Worker Data

Each row is one worker. Required fields:

Full legal name and current home address.
Last four digits of the Social Security number. The form does not ask for the full SSN.
Work classification, using the exact craft or trade from the wage determination (laborer, carpenter, heavy equipment operator, and so on) rather than a shorthand label.
Hours worked on the public project, both daily and weekly totals.
Straight-time and overtime hourly rates.
Gross wages, in separate columns for the public project and for total gross wages from all work that week.
Itemized deductions for taxes, insurance, and other authorized withholdings, plus net pay.

Overtime is paid at one and a half times the worker’s regular rate. On a prevailing wage project the regular rate equals the hourly wage set by Labor and Industry plus any cash paid in lieu of fringe benefits. Bona fide fringe contributions to a third-party plan do not fold into the regular rate.⁴

Reporting Fringe Benefits

Fringe benefits are a large piece of prevailing wage compensation, and the form has distinct columns for the two ways to pay them: contributions to a bona fide plan (health insurance, retirement, or life insurance administered by a third party) or cash paid directly to the worker as an hourly add-on. If you pay fringes in cash, list that amount in the cash column. Blending cash fringes into the base rate without identifying them is a compliance failure.⁴

Signing the Statement of Compliance

The back page gives the form its legal weight. By signing, you affirm three things: that the prevailing wage requirements and predetermined rates are in the contract, that neither you nor any subcontractor on the project is currently debarred under the Act, and that the payroll data on the front is accurate.⁵ The form warns that willful falsification can lead to civil or criminal prosecution.

The signature block also asks for the firm’s legal name, business address, and the names and titles of all owners, partners, or officers. First-time filers often leave the ownership section blank or incomplete, and an incomplete form gets kicked back.

Submission and Recordkeeping

Submit the completed LLC-25 to the public body that awarded the contract at the end of each work week. That awarding body, not the Department of Labor and Industry, is your direct recipient and uses your certified payrolls as the primary tool for verifying that prevailing wages are being paid.² Some public bodies accept electronic filings, others want paper. Confirm the preferred method before the project begins.

Section 6 of the Prevailing Wage Act requires you to keep accurate records showing each worker’s name, craft, and actual hourly wage rate, and to preserve them for at least two years from the date of payment.¹ Beyond the LLC-25 itself, the Bureau of Labor Law Compliance expects timecards for every worker, complete fringe benefit and deduction records, and signed apprenticeship indentures for any apprentices on the job.⁴

Paying and Reporting Apprentices

Apprentices can be paid less than the full journeyworker prevailing wage rate, but only if each apprentice is individually registered in a program approved by the Pennsylvania Apprenticeship and Training Council. Keep signed indentures on file and have the Council’s approval available for inspection.⁴ Workers in your own in-house training program that is not registered with the Council must be paid the full prevailing wage. Using an unregistered program to justify lower rates is treated as an intentional violation.

Projects With Both State and Federal Funds

When a project draws on both Pennsylvania state funds and federal funds, the federal Davis-Bacon Act and the Pennsylvania Prevailing Wage Act apply at the same time. Pay whichever rate is higher for each classification. Federal guidance is explicit that even when state prevailing wage law applies, Davis-Bacon requirements still stand, including weekly certified payrolls under both frameworks.⁶ For dual-funded work, pull the applicable federal wage determination from sam.gov, pull the state rates from dliweb.pa.gov, and compare classification by classification before you set pay.

What Gets Contractors Into Trouble

The Bureau of Labor Law Compliance investigates prevailing wage complaints and runs its own inspections. Consequences turn on whether the violation was intentional.

If the Secretary of Labor and Industry finds after a hearing that prevailing wages were not paid but the failure was not intentional, the contractor gets a reasonable opportunity to fix it by paying affected workers or posting adequate security for the amounts owed on terms the Secretary approves.¹

Intentional violations are much heavier. The Secretary notifies all public bodies of the contractor’s name, and the contractor is barred from receiving any public work contract for three years from the date of notice. Any firm, corporation, or partnership in which the debarred contractor has an interest is blocked as well.¹ The Secretary can also ask the Attorney General to recover liquidated damages equal to the amount of underpaid wages.

A false Statement of Compliance is a criminal matter. Knowingly verifying a false certified payroll under oath is a misdemeanor carrying up to $2,500 in fines, up to five years of imprisonment, or both.¹

The Department of Labor and Industry lists the actions it treats as intentional violations. The frequent ones include misclassifying workers to avoid the higher prevailing rate for their actual duties, applying preset ratios of craft and laborer work instead of paying for the work actually performed, telling workers to under-report craft time on their timecards, and failing to produce payroll records when investigators ask for them.⁴ Paying cash supplements off the books instead of the full prevailing wage with proper tax deductions is also on the list.

1
Pennsylvania General Assembly. Pennsylvania Prevailing Wage Act
2
Department of Labor and Industry. Prevailing Wage Projects
3
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Prevailing Wage
4
Department of Labor & Industry, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Prevailing Wage FAQs
5
Points North. Weekly Payroll Certification for Public Works Projects
6
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. Davis-Bacon Act Frequently Asked Questions