New Hampshire Prevailing Wage

New Hampshire repealed its state prevailing wage law in 1985, and it was among the first New England states to do so. As a result, contractors bidding state, county, or municipal work funded solely with New Hampshire dollars are not bound by state-mandated prevailing wage rates. You can price labor at competitive market wages on those projects, and there is no state certified-payroll requirement and no state agency administering a prevailing wage program, which keeps the compliance load on purely state and local work relatively light.

That freedom ends where federal funding begins. Any New Hampshire project receiving federal money over $2,000 falls under the federal Davis-Bacon Act, requiring you to pay no less than the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage and fringe rates published for the locality and trade. On those jobs you must also submit weekly certified payroll to the contracting agency, classify workers correctly, and deliver fringe benefits in cash or through qualifying plans. Federally assisted highway, water, housing, and infrastructure projects commonly trigger Davis-Bacon, so the funding source, not the project type, determines your labor pricing basis.

The central pitfall is estimating a federally funded New Hampshire job at open-market wages and then being forced onto Davis-Bacon rates after award, which compresses margin and creates exposure to back wages, withheld payments, and federal debarment. Protect your bid by reading the solicitation for any wage determination attachment, confirming the funding stream before you finalize numbers, and treating a project as Davis-Bacon-covered until you can prove no federal money is involved.