Most payroll tools say prevailing wage rates are “applied automatically” and leave it there. Automatically from where? Verified how? On public works, the answer matters: pay below the determination and you owe back wages and penalties — and the certified payroll you signed is a sworn document.
Bullwork's rate library covers all 58 California counties — the main trades and the county subtrades — and holds every rate to a standard you can audit yourself:
1. The document proves its own numbers
Every DIR determination publishes a total for each rate line. A rate enters the library only when the base rate plus every itemized fringe — health & welfare, pension, vacation/holiday, training, other — recomposes that published total to exact integer arithmetic. That includes the components the DIR defines only in footnotes, like “in addition, an amount equal to 3% of the basic hourly rate is added to the total”: parsed from the DIR's own footnote definitions, attributed to the right fringe category, and recomputed whenever the base steps up.
2. Anything that doesn't reconcile is quarantined
A row that fails the arithmetic never serves — it lands in an exception queue for a human to resolve against the source PDF. In practice this catches the DIR's own misprints: across roughly 2,900 verified rates statewide, the gate caught a published total that disagreed with its own overtime columns by ten cents. That row is quarantined; the other 99.96% serve with proof.
3. The library never guesses
Some determinations split a county along township lines — the same classification pays differently on each side of a boundary no county-level database can see. When that happens, the library refuses to answer rather than pick a side. Inside Bullwork, you confirm the job site's area once against the determination's own boundary text, and every lookup after that is deterministic.
4. Increases step in on schedule
Determinations marked ** carry predetermined increases. The library loads them from the DIR's increase notices and applies the step in effect for each work date automatically — so the week a rate goes up, your payroll and your certified payroll go up with it. Where the DIR has published the increase amount but not yet its wage/fringe split, the split is held conservatively and flagged until the DIR's distribution is confirmed.
5. It checks itself, continuously
A freshness monitor re-downloads every source document and compares it byte-for-byte against what the library was verified from — so an amended determination or a newly published allocation is detected, not discovered. A health monitor in the database alarms if a craft silently stops serving, an increase fails to increase, or a new DIR publication period arrives before it's been ingested.
6. Federal Davis-Bacon holds the same bar
The library also carries every active federal Davis-Bacon general decision for California — all 58 counties across Building, Residential, Heavy, and Highway construction. The DOL format publishes rate and fringe with no total to recompose, so the verification is structural instead: every document must reconcile row-for-row against an independent scan, county scopes must match the government's own metadata exactly, and every rate stores the verbatim line of decision text it came from. After loading, an independent verifier re-fetches the live decisions from SAM.gov and re-checks every rate — the current library passed 2,742 of 2,742 with zero mismatches. DOL revises decisions weekly; the library compares its stored revision numbers against the live ones. And where overlapping union schedules disagree on a rate, the lookup refuses to answer rather than pick one.
Check us
Every rate carries a link to the exact DIR or DOL document it was verified against. Look up your craft and county in the free rate finder and follow the source link. This is the same library Bullwork's payroll engine pays from — the rate on the paycheck, the rate on the WH-347, and the rate on the DIR eCPR are one number with one provenance.