Wage determinations are the foundation of prevailing wage compliance. Every SCA or Davis-Bacon covered contract has an applicable WD that sets the minimum wage rates and fringe benefit obligations for that contract. The WD you use must be the right one: correct statute, correct state and county, correct revision in effect at the time of performance. SAM.gov is the authoritative source, but the system's navigation is not intuitive, and common lookup mistakes result in contractors applying the wrong WD to real payroll decisions.
This article walks through the SAM.gov wage determination lookup process for SCA contracts specifically, covers the revision tracking problem, and explains what to do when the WD in your contract is different from the current published revision.
The Two Separate Wage Determination Databases
SAM.gov's wage determination search operates across two distinct databases: one for Service Contract Act determinations and one for Davis-Bacon Act determinations. These are not subsets of a single database. They are separate data systems with different geographic organization, different occupational classification structures, and different revision cycles.
When you enter the SAM.gov wage determinations portal, the first parameter you set is the prevailing wage type: SCA or Davis-Bacon. If you are looking up an SCA determination for a services contract and accidentally pull from the Davis-Bacon database, you will find a WD that exists and looks like a valid wage determination, but it will have trade classifications applicable to construction, not to service occupations, and the fringe structure will be wrong for SCA compliance purposes. This error is more common than it should be, particularly for contractors who hold both types of covered work and have staff who pull WDs across both.
SCA Wage Determination Search Parameters
For an SCA contract, the primary search parameters in SAM.gov are state and county. The SCA WD system is organized geographically: each WD covers a specific county or group of counties within a state. The applicable WD for your contract is determined by the primary place of performance, not by where your company is headquartered or where payroll is processed.
After entering state and county, the search returns a list of applicable SCA WDs for that location. You will typically see multiple WDs covering different industry or service categories within the same county. The categories relevant to common service contract types include general services, health care, professional and technical services, and others. You need to identify the category that matches the service work in your contract, then select the applicable determination for that category and location.
Once you have the WD selected, review the occupational listings. The WD will enumerate specific occupational categories from the SCA Directory of Occupations with corresponding hourly wage rates. Verify that the occupational categories covering your workforce are listed in this WD. If they are not, you may have pulled the wrong category WD, or you may have a conformance issue as discussed in our NAICS code article.
Understanding WD Numbers and Revision Dates
Each SCA wage determination has a WD number in the format of a series identifier and a sequence number, plus a revision number appended as a suffix. An example format would be WD 15-5578 (Rev. 22). The base WD number identifies the determination. The revision number indicates how many times that determination has been updated since it was first issued.
The revision number matters because wage rates in a WD are not static. When DOL updates wage rates in a WD, it does not issue a new WD number; it issues a new revision of the existing WD. The occupational wage rates, and sometimes the covered occupational categories, change between revisions. A revision issued two years ago may have different wage rates than the current revision.
This creates a compliance tracking problem. The WD number in your contract paperwork is typically the revision that was current when the contract was awarded or last modified. If the WD has been revised since then and the new revision has not been incorporated into your contract, your contract technically still calls for the rates in the old revision. But if a contract modification incorporates a newer revision, your payroll must reflect the newer rates from the modification's effective date forward.
To verify your current obligation: look up your WD number in SAM.gov and compare the revision number shown in SAM.gov against the revision number in your contract. If SAM.gov shows a newer revision than your contract, you need to determine whether that revision has been incorporated into your contract through a modification, and if so, when. Your contracting officer should be the source of this information. Do not assume that a WD revision automatically applies to your payroll without a contract modification incorporating it.
Downloading and Storing WDs for Compliance Records
SAM.gov allows you to download WDs as PDFs. For each covered contract, you should download and store the WD at the specific revision that is incorporated into your contract, not just the current revision. During a DOL investigation, the investigator will ask what wage rates applied to a specific pay period. The applicable rates are from the WD revision in effect during that period. If the current SAM.gov revision is different from the revision that was in effect, and you only have the current version, you cannot demonstrate what the applicable rates were during the investigation period.
Best practice: store the WD PDF at each revision with the effective date and the contract modification number that incorporated it. When a new revision is incorporated into a contract, archive the prior revision rather than deleting it. The archive is the compliance record for any period covered by the prior revision.
What to Do When Your Contract WD and SAM.gov Are Out of Sync
Contracts with multiple option periods, particularly in IT services and facility operations, commonly end up with WD revisions that are several years old because the contracting agency has not issued a modification to update the WD. This can occur even when the SCA requires contract modification to incorporate updated WDs at option exercise.
When you notice that SAM.gov shows a significantly newer revision than your contract WD, the compliance-correct action is to contact your contracting officer and request confirmation of which revision is currently incorporated and whether a modification is planned for the next option period. Document the correspondence. If the contracting officer confirms the old revision is still governing and no modification has been issued, then your payroll obligation runs at the old revision's rates, even if newer rates would be higher.
We are not suggesting contractors resist rate updates. Applying updated rates voluntarily before they are incorporated into the contract creates a compliance mismatch in the other direction. Your payroll system applies the new rates, your contract says the old rates, and you now have a documentation gap. The right answer is to get the contract modification issued that formally incorporates the new WD revision, and then update payroll from the modification's effective date.
Using the SAM.gov API for Bulk Lookups
Contractors managing large contract portfolios with wage determinations across many counties and states benefit from using the SAM.gov Wage Determination API rather than the manual web interface. The API allows programmatic lookup by WD number to return the current revision, and bulk queries by state and county to retrieve applicable WDs for a portfolio of contract locations.
At CVRD Health, our contract setup workflow uses the SAM.gov API to pull and store the current WD at contract initialization, and to flag when a revision update is detected for a WD that is currently in a contractor's active contract portfolio. The flag prompts the contractor to verify whether a contract modification has been issued to incorporate the new revision. This is the kind of check that is easy to build into a systematic workflow but nearly impossible to maintain reliably through a manual quarterly review across a large portfolio.
H&W Rate Is Not in the WD
One point that trips up contractors new to SCA compliance: the Health and Welfare fringe rate is not set in the wage determination you pull from SAM.gov. The WD lists occupational wage rates for your locality. The H&W rate is set separately by the DOL All-Agency Memorandum and applies nationally at the same rate regardless of location. The current H&W rate comes from the latest AAM published on the DOL Wage and Hour Division's website, not from SAM.gov. Your fringe equivalency calculation requires both inputs: the occupational wage rate from the WD (geographic), and the H&W rate from the AAM (national). Missing either one means an incomplete compliance calculation.