Introduction to the Payroll XML Format

Contractors must submit certified weekly payrolls to owner agencies for contracts subject to Davis-Bacon and related Acts. Owner agencies receiving the payrolls are required to determine that contractor employees have received the required wages and fringe benefits. The Wage and Hour Division of the United States Department of Labor provides Wage Hour Form 347 (WH-347) for hard copy submission of this information.

Many contractors have payroll systems containing the payroll information that they are required to submit. Ideally contractors could electronically submit payroll information from their payroll systems to owner agencies. The Payroll XML format is a certified payroll data format intended to be used for that purpose. It includes the information typically found in the WH-347 form as well as other data that agencies require.

Background

The Payroll XML format was developed by the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO) under the AASHTOWare Joint Software Development Program. Owner agencies using the AASHTOWare Project Civil Rights & Labor™ (formerly Trns•port CRLMS®) module can import certified payrolls in the Payroll XML format.

The Payroll XML format is an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) format based on the TransXML standard. The format is defined in the Payroll XML Schema. The TransXML standard was developed by National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Project 20-64 - "TransXML: XML Schemas for Exchange of Transportation Data". The TransXML standard is based on the Open Geospatial Consortium's OpenGIS Geography Markup Language (GML) encoding standard.

See About XML and Schemas for general information about XML and XML Schemas.

Payroll XML Contents

The Payroll XML format includes all required WH-347 information:

  • Payroll header information such as contractor name, and payroll begin and end dates
  • Benefit program information
  • Employee identifying information such as name and identifying number
  • Employee hours and wages by work classification

Payroll XML Format Validation

The Payroll XML Schema defines the structural rules of the Payroll XML format. This includes aspects such as element names, which elements are required, the data type of each element, and so on. A Payroll XML file can be validated against the Payroll XML Schema to verify that it is correctly formatted based on these structural rules. The Payroll XML Resource Kit includes two validation options: an AASHTOWare Project Online Payroll XML Validator web page, and the downloadable payroll validation program.