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Schools, municipal, and federal work is a large diversification channel locked behind compliance many restorers never learn.

A RocketLevel piece for restoration owners, sales managers, and finance leaders, backed by decades of experience in the trade. This is the GEM home for winning and delivering public and institutional work: wage rules, registration, bonding, procurement, and the add-ons hospitals and schools bring. About a 10-minute read.

Plenty of restoration shops never bid a school, a city building, or a federal facility. The work is steady, sizable, and far less referral-dependent than residential; what keeps them out is a front door that looks intimidating. There are wage rules, payroll filings, bonding, vendor registrations, and a procurement process that has nothing in common with how a residential loss gets sold.

Public schools flood, municipal buildings burn, and county and federal facilities take water, mold, and storm losses like everyone else. The contractors who learn the compliance mechanics get access to a large, durable channel with predictable decision makers and budgets, while many competitors never apply.

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Prevailing wage and certified payroll

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Reviewed October 2026. Wage, bonding and procurement rules change, and state rules vary. Use this page to know what to ask, then confirm with the contracting agency or a construction attorney before you rely on it.

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The first thing that scares restorers off public work is the wage rules, and they are very learnable.

• The Davis-Bacon Act applies to federal contracts for construction, alteration, or repair in excess of $2,000 (40 U.S.C. 3142(a)). That is a low bar, and nearly any federal mitigation or repair job you would want clears it.
• Davis-Bacon Related Acts extend the same wage rules to projects that are federally assisted rather than federally contracted. That matters directly to restoration, because a school or municipal building repaired with federal disaster or grant money can be covered even though your contract is with the district, not with Washington. Ask who is funding the repair before you price it, not after.
• State-funded and locally funded projects run on the state's own prevailing wage law where one exists, and we have not surveyed which states have one. Each sets its own dollar threshold and its own rate schedule, so look up the state the project sits in rather than assuming your neighbor state's number.
• You must pay the published prevailing rate for each labor classification, and on Davis-Bacon covered work you must submit certified payroll weekly, for every week in which covered work is performed (29 CFR 5.5(a)(3)(ii)(A)). The Department of Labor's Form WH-347 is one way to file it, and any format carrying the same information is accepted. Short wages do not stay a paperwork issue: under 29 CFR 5.5(a)(2) the agency can hold back enough of what it owes you to cover the unpaid wages.

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Before you sign a certified payroll, understand what you are signing. The Statement of Compliance on a Davis-Bacon certified payroll is a certification to the federal government. The regulation itself warns that falsifying it may subject the contractor or subcontractor to civil or criminal prosecution under 18 U.S.C. 1001 and the False Claims Act at 31 U.S.C. 3729, at 29 CFR 5.5(a)(3)(ii)(F). The Statement of Compliance requirement itself sits at 5.5(a)(3)(ii)(C), and (B) is now the paragraph requiring the payroll to set out the required information accurately and completely. The Department of Labor renumbered these paragraphs in its 2023 rulemaking, so a guide that still cites (B) for the falsification warning is working from the old lettering. Misclassifying a tech to a lower-paid classification, or letting an office manager sign a payroll they did not actually verify, is a federal certification problem on this kind of work. Assign one person, train them, and do not bid the job until you have them.

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Once your back office knows how to classify labor and file certified payroll correctly, it becomes routine. That administrative muscle is what keeps a lot of competitors out.

Bonding, registration, and the approved-vendor list

Public agencies want assurance you can perform and pay, so they require credentials before you can win work.

• Get your contractor license right first. Public registration is a separate thing from being licensed to do the work at all, and the second one carries the harder penalty. In California, an unlicensed contractor cannot bring or maintain any action to collect compensation for the work, and the customer can sue to recover everything already paid (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code 7031(a) and (b)). Quality of the work is no defense. Before you chase a public job in a state you have not worked in, confirm the license classification that state requires for the scope, and confirm whether your qualifying individual and your reciprocity actually cover it.
• Public-works registration can be a second step, separate from your license. Whether your state requires a contractor to register as a public-works or prevailing-wage contractor before it can submit a bid, and how often that registration renews, is set by state law, and we have not surveyed which states require one. California requires registration with the Department of Industrial Relations under Labor Code 1725.5 to bid on, be listed in a bid for, or perform public works. Read the exemption in the same section before you assume it reaches your job: it does not apply to work performed on a public works project of $25,000 or less for construction, or $15,000 or less for maintenance. Where registration is required and you do not hold it, it can void your bid.