NYSDOL certified payroll · guide
How to file certified payroll in New York
Since 1 January 2026, certified payroll on New York public work has to be filed electronically through the NYSDOL portal. Paper is gone. This is what the process actually involves.
Before you can file anything
Four things you need in hand.
A Public Work Contractor Registration. You cannot bid or file without it.
An NY.gov account with access to the certified payroll portal.
The PRC number for each project. Ten characters, found on your dashboard against the project. It goes in every file.
Your payroll data, per week, per project — including daily hours by worker and by classification. That last part catches people: most payroll registers hold weekly totals, while the filing needs the day-by-day breakdown, which usually lives in a time-tracking system or on a foreman's sheet.
The two ways to file
Type it in, or upload XML.
Manual entry works through the portal screen by screen. Fine for a handful of employees on one project; punishing at any scale.
Bulk upload takes an XML file built to the state's published schema. There is no CSV or spreadsheet upload, and the state confirms there is no API. XML is the only automated route.
The limits that shape everything: one project per file, one week per file, 500 employee records maximum. A contractor with twenty active projects is producing twenty files a week, every week.
Deadlines
Every 30 days per project — including quiet weeks.
Submissions are due at least every thirty days for each project, for the life of that project, including periods when no work was performed. Skipping weeks where nobody was on site is one of the easiest ways to fall behind without realising.
The statute provides for penalties of $100 per day after a fourteen-day grace period, plus withheld payments and debarment exposure. In fairness: NYSDOL's current guidance says it is exercising discretion and not issuing those fines yet, and that a public announcement will come first. The filings are mandatory regardless.
If you work for the City
NYC contracts mean filing the same payroll twice.
State law requires the NYSDOL filing on Article 8 work no matter who awarded the contract. City contracts solicited on or after 31 December 2025 additionally require submission through New York City's eComply database — a different system, in a different format, taking a payroll-provider import file rather than the state's XML.
Where it goes wrong
The five things that bounce a file.
Roughly in order of how often they catch people:
1. The work classification doesn't match. The portal validates against a fixed list of 261 strings and matches exactly. Your payroll system's internal trade names almost never line up. The full list is here.
2. The same employee appears twice. Payroll exports one row per classification; the portal wants one employee with several work weeks. More on that →
3. Both date of birth and SSN last four were sent. Exactly one is allowed. More →
4. The PRC number is wrong length — usually a leading zero eaten by a spreadsheet. More →
5. A date falls outside the payroll week, or the week ending timestamp is missing its milliseconds. More →
Want the file built for you?
Send one project's payroll export for one week and we'll send back a portal-ready XML file, plus a written list of anything else that would have been rejected. Free, no signup — we're building the tool that does this automatically and we would rather learn the edge cases on real payroll.