Look up and refresh Hawaii prevailing wage rates

Before you begin

Know which schedule governs the work. State-funded public work in Hawaii runs on the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations wage schedule; federally funded work runs on the Davis-Bacon determination for the county and construction type; some jobs are subject to both, in which case the higher rate for each classification applies. The rates in front of you are only correct if you're looking at the right schedule to begin with.

The classification is where the money is. A worker paid the correct rate for the wrong classification is a finding, and it's the most common one.

Steps

1. Go to Cost Data → Hawaii Rates and open the Prevailing Wage Rates tab.
2. Use the Rates tab to browse the schedule. Look up the classification you need and read the base rate and fringe.
3. Use the Context tab when you're unsure which classification a scope falls into. It previews the classification lookup so you can check the call before it's baked into a week of time.
4. When the state reissues the schedule, click Refresh to pull the current rates. This is restricted to manager-level users and above, since it changes the rates everyone else is reading.
5. Confirm the refresh landed by spot-checking two or three classifications you know changed.
6. Set the craft classification on each employee's record to match a classification that exists on the applicable schedule. This is what certified payroll reads.

What happens next

Rates feed both directions. They price labor in an estimate, so a prevailing wage job is bid at the rate you'll actually have to pay rather than at your standard shop rate. And they're what the certified payroll report checks against when it's generated, which is the point at which a misclassification stops being a preference and becomes a compliance problem.

Worth being clear about one limit: there's no screen that attaches a wage determination to a project as a stored property. The wage group is chosen when a certified payroll report is generated, not set once on the job and inherited. If several people generate reports on the same job, they need to agree on the group rather than relying on the project to remember it.

Where the record lives

The imported schedule is kept with the rates as imported, so a payroll generated in March can be checked against the schedule that was in effect in March rather than against today's. Each refresh replaces the working set without discarding what a prior report was built on.

Troubleshooting

A classification you need isn't in the list: either the schedule hasn't been refreshed since it was added, or the scope genuinely falls under a different classification than you assumed. Check the Context lookup before inventing one.

Refresh is greyed out: it's role-gated to manager and above. That's intentional — a rate import changes what everybody else is pricing and paying against.

Estimate labor doesn't match what payroll is paying: confirm the estimate was priced from the prevailing wage schedule rather than from standard rates. On public work these are different numbers and the gap is not small.