How to prove which rates applied on your bid date

Sooner or later someone asks: the contracting officer during a pricing review, a GC passing through an agency question, a DOL investigator, or your own PM re-pricing a change order. The document you priced from was a specific revision of a specific wage determination, and by the time anyone asks, it has usually been superseded.

What you actually need to produce

Four facts settle the question: the decision number (like MN20260024), the revision number that governed your bid, that revision’s publish date, and its classification table. “Governed” is defined by FAR 22.404-6: for sealed bids, the latest revision published ten or more calendar days before bid opening, with narrow exceptions for negotiated work and long award delays.

Why this is hard with SAM.gov alone

SAM.gov presents the current revision. Superseded revisions of the current year’s decision take digging, and once the annual rollover hits, the old decision number itself disappears from casual view. Reconstructing “what did rev 1 say last March” from scratch means knowing exactly what to ask for, and nothing on the current page tells you which classifications have moved since you bid.

The five-minute version

Look up your determination on WagePin by number, county, or ZIP. Its page shows the full revision history with publish dates, so the ten-day arithmetic is one glance: find the last revision published ten or more days before your bid opening. Every revision’s classification table is archived, exports to CSV, and prints as a clean rate sheet with a retrieval header, ready for the bid file or audit workpapers. If rates moved after you priced, the diff between your revision and the current one lists exactly which classifications changed and by how much.

Better: pin the project before you bid

Pinning a project records the governing revision at bid time, applying the ten-day rule for you. From then on, any substantive change to that determination arrives as an email diff compared against your pinned revision, not just the previous one. When the question comes months later, the answer is already written down, contemporaneously.

This page is a plain-language summary, not legal advice. The contracting officer’s determination and the FAR govern; verify the official documents for anything contractual.