Screening New York State certified payrolls against published prevailing-wage schedules
Every week, contractors on New York public-work projects file certified payrolls that the State publishes as open data. The State also publishes the prevailing-wage schedules those payrolls must meet. This project joins the two — 588,505 wage lines against both 2025–2026 and 2026–2027 rate schedules for all 62 counties — and surfaces a ranked, evidence-cited set of candidates for human review.
How to read these findings
Every finding on this site is a screening candidate drawn from public records, requiring investigation — not a determination that any law was broken. A finding means one thing only: a certified-payroll line, filed by the contractor itself in a public state dataset, reports an hourly cash wage below the lowest published journeyworker rate for the matched trade classification in that county and schedule period.
Lawful explanations that public data cannot rule out include: workers in registered apprenticeship or training programs whose registration is not visible in the dataset; wage components paid as supplements rather than cash; classification nuances the published schedules do not capture; and data-entry errors in the underlying filings. The screen removes the candidate classes it can detect (payments matching scheduled apprentice rates, payments matching another classification’s exact rate), but it cannot verify apprenticeship registration or supplement payments from public data.
Exposure figures are indicative screening magnitudes (shortfall per hour times reported project hours), not damages estimates. If you believe any entry is in error, contact thomas@concoursetech.com and it will be reviewed promptly.
The funnel
The screen is deliberately conservative at every stage: it compares each payroll line only against the lowest published journeyworker rate for the matched trade family in that county and schedule period, and then removes the false-positive classes it can detect from public data. Bars are square-root scaled; exact counts are shown.
Where the standing findings are
| County | Standing findings | Contractors | Indicative exposure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Orange | 664 | 27 | $217,299 |
| Albany | 537 | 59 | $134,816 |
| Erie | 368 | 34 | $133,372 |
| New York | 341 | 29 | $110,785 |
| Suffolk | 483 | 43 | $106,364 |
| Dutchess | 279 | 18 | $106,218 |
| Westchester | 416 | 35 | $103,275 |
| Nassau | 434 | 35 | $92,561 |
| Onondaga | 355 | 28 | $66,877 |
| Ulster | 188 | 19 | $64,579 |
Top 10 of 62 counties with standing findings.
By trade
| Trade | Standing findings | Contractors | Indicative exposure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electrician | 915 | 54 | $391,401 |
| Laborer | 1,192 | 103 | $251,776 |
| Plumber | 767 | 59 | $246,276 |
| Carpenter | 892 | 88 | $212,696 |
| Mason | 642 | 22 | $110,878 |
| Electrician Lineman | 389 | 14 | $102,500 |
| Painter | 254 | 23 | $77,396 |
| Ironworker | 306 | 22 | $68,532 |
| Steamfitter | 239 | 22 | $60,692 |
| Sheetmetal | 260 | 29 | $50,856 |
Read more
- Method — how county attribution, floor selection, and the two-tier screen work.
- Validation — what was hand-verified, the debarment back-test reported honestly, and the false-positive controls.
- Data & caveats — sources, known limitations, and how to reproduce the pipeline.
- Whitepaper — the full write-up, including an appendix on replicating this analysis for New York City.