Screening New York State certified payrolls against published prevailing-wage schedules

Data through July 20, 2026 · screen generated July 21, 2026 · 62 counties · two schedule vintages

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.

6,835

payroll lines across 468 contractors report a cash wage materially below the published rate for their trade, county and week — and are not explained by any screen the public data supports.

$1,754,083

indicative exposure — shortfall per hour × reported project hours

468

contractors in the standing candidate set

370

findings independently corroborated by the weekly gross-wages field

588,505

wage lines screened, with zero silent drops

Browse the candidate set →

How to read these findings

These are screening candidates for human review. Nothing here is a finding of wrongdoing, and no contractor named on this site has been determined by anyone to have underpaid a worker.

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 screen

From 588,505 lines to 6,835 candidates

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.

Certified-payroll wage lines harvested from data.ny.gov588,505

Starting corpus — every published line in the window

January 1, 2026 through July 20, 2026 · 3,503 contractor accounts · all 62 counties

Screenable journeyworker lines554,606

94.2% of the previous stage · 94.2% of all harvested lines− 33,899 lines not screenable

Lines labeled Journeyman carrying a plausible hourly rate. Every excluded line is logged with a reason — none is silently dropped.

Tier 1 — reported cash wage below the scheduled floor24,947

4.5% of the previous stage · 4.2% of all harvested lines− 529,659 lines at or above the scheduled floor

928 contractors. The floor is the lowest published journeyworker rate mappable to that trade family, in that county, under the schedule in force that week — a deliberate under-flag.

High confidence — shortfall of 15% or more12,602

50.5% of the previous stage · 2.1% of all harvested lines− 12,345 flags with a shortfall under 15%

605 contractors.

Standing candidate set after the Tier 2 screens6,835

54.2% of the previous stage · 1.2% of all harvested lines− 5,767 flags explained by the published schedules themselves

468 contractors · $1,754,083 indicative exposure. Set aside here: flags whose reported rate matches a scheduled apprentice rate, or another classification’s exact journeyworker rate. Across all 24,947 Tier-1 flags those two screens account for 6,486 and 1,379 respectively.

Each bar is drawn to a linear scale against the stage above it, so its length is exactly the share of that stage which survived the test. Percentages of the full 588,505-line corpus are given as numbers rather than as bar length — a single scale across an 86-fold drop would render the last stage invisible, and compressing it would make length overstate what remains.

Geography

Where the standing findings are

Top 10 of 62 counties, ranked by indicative exposure.

County	Indicative exposure	Standing findings	Contractors
Orange	$217,299	664	27
Albany	$134,816	537	59
Erie	$133,372	368	34
New York	$110,785	341	29
Suffolk	$106,364	483	43
Dutchess	$106,218	279	18
Westchester	$103,275	416	35
Nassau	$92,561	434	35
Onondaga	$66,877	355	28
Ulster	$64,579	188	19

Trades

By trade

Top 10 of 20 trades, ranked by indicative exposure.

Trade	Indicative exposure	Standing findings	Contractors
Electrician	$391,401	915	54
Laborer	$251,776	1,192	103
Plumber	$246,276	767	59
Carpenter	$212,696	892	88
Mason	$110,878	642	22
Electrician Lineman	$102,500	389	14
Painter	$77,396	254	23
Ironworker	$68,532	306	22
Steamfitter	$60,692	239	22
Sheetmetal	$50,856	260	29

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.

Screening New York State certified payrolls against published prevailing-wage schedules

How to read these findings

From 588,505 lines to 6,835 candidates

Where the standing findings are

By trade

Method, validation and limits