Affidavit of Wages Paid status: why Washington retainage release is blocked

Because the sixty-day release clock in Washington law is not unconditional. RCW 60.28.011(3)(b) says that sixty days after completion of all contract work the public body "must release and pay in full the amounts retained during the performance of the contract" — and then ends the same sentence with the words "subject to the provisions of chapter 39.12 RCW and this chapter." Chapter 39.12 RCW is Washington's prevailing wage chapter, and it carries a precondition that stops the payment regardless of the calendar. Until that precondition is satisfied, the sixty days can pass and the money stays where it is. An awarding agency still holding retainage on day ninety is usually not in breach of anything; more often the agency is doing exactly what RCW 39.12.040 instructs it to do.

An approved Affidavit of Wages Paid is the statutory condition on releasing retained funds. RCW 39.12.040(1)(b) states: "Following the final acceptance of a public works project, it is the duty of the officer charged with the disbursement of public funds, to require the contractor and each and every subcontractor from the contractor or a subcontractor to submit to such officer an affidavit of wages paid before the funds retained according to the provisions of RCW 60.28.011 are released to the contractor." The disbursing officer is not exercising judgement or preference in withholding — the duty runs the other way. On a public works project where no retainage is withheld at all, the same subsection moves the deadline earlier rather than removing it: the affidavit must then be submitted before final acceptance of the project.

Every firm on the job. RCW 39.12.040(1)(b) requires the affidavit from "the contractor and each and every subcontractor from the contractor or a subcontractor," which reaches down the whole tier chain rather than stopping at firms holding a contract directly with the awarding agency. One fourth-tier subcontractor who never filed is enough to leave the retained fund sitting at the agency for everybody above that subcontractor. This is the reason a contractor whose own paperwork is complete and correct can still be waiting indefinitely: the missing document may belong to a firm that contractor has no contractual relationship with, was never told about, and cannot name without reading the filings for the project.

No, and the distinction is where a great many blocked contracts sit. RCW 39.12.040(1)(b) requires that "Each affidavit of wages paid must be certified by the industrial statistician of the department of labor and industries before it is submitted to the disbursing officer." A form that has been started, submitted for review, or returned for correction has not been certified, and an uncertified affidavit does not satisfy the release condition. The same two-step applies at the opposite end of the job: RCW 39.12.040(1)(a) and (b) require a Statement of Intent to Pay Prevailing Wages, approved by the same industrial statistician, before the disbursing officer pays out anything at all. A single contract can therefore be blocked at the front end, the back end, or both.

Washington L&I publishes both records as open data on data.wa.gov, so checking does not require an account with the awarding agency or a records request. The Statement of Intent file and the Affidavit of Wages Paid file are separate published datasets, keyed to each other by intent ID. Fetched on 14 August 2026, the published Intent file carried 1,307,673 rows and the published Affidavit file carried 1,186,282 rows — a standing difference of 121,391 records. That difference is not a list of blocked contracts, and reading it as one is the most common way this comparison is got wrong: most of the gap is jobs still running, contracts cancelled, and filings made on paper that never reached the published extract. A genuinely blocked contract will, however, appear inside that gap. HeldBack's free check runs the comparison for one company name or UBI at a time.

Yes, in defined circumstances, and at a real cost that is stated in the same subsection. RCW 39.12.040(1)(b) permits that "the contractor or subcontractor with whom the subcontractor had a contractual relationship for the project may file the forms on behalf of the nonresponsive subcontractor," and then limits the route: "Affidavit forms may only be filed on behalf of a nonresponsive subcontractor who has ceased operations or failed to file as required by this section." The price of using it appears in the next sentence — "The contractor filing the affidavit must accept responsibility for payment of prevailing wages unpaid by the subcontractor on the project pursuant to RCW 39.12.020 and 39.12.065." Filing on behalf of a defunct subcontractor therefore moves that subcontractor's unpaid prevailing wage liability onto the filer. Intentionally filing a false affidavit on another firm's behalf carries the penalties set out in RCW 39.12.050.

Not immediately, because RCW 60.28.021 adds a second set of conditions that sit after the affidavits. The public body pays the balance only once the forty-five day lien notice period established by RCW 60.28.011(2) has expired, and "after receipt of the certificates of the department of revenue, the employment security department, and the department of labor and industries," and once the public body is satisfied that the certified taxes are discharged and that filed material supplier and laborer claims have been paid. Where taxes or claims are still outstanding, RCW 60.28.021 directs the public body to hold back an amount equal to those unpaid amounts together with a sum sufficient to cover foreclosure costs and attorney fees, and to release the remainder. A partial release is therefore a normal statutory outcome rather than a sign that something has gone wrong.

Retainage on a Washington public improvement contract is capped at five percent. RCW 60.28.011(1)(a) requires public bodies to reserve "a contract retainage not to exceed five percent of the moneys earned by the contractor as a trust fund for the protection and payment of" claims arising under the contract and certain state tax obligations. Because five percent is a ceiling rather than a fixed rate, five percent of a firm's own contract amount is an upper estimate and never a balance — the awarding agency's ledger is the only authority on the actual figure. Two adjustments matter while a job is still open. RCW 60.28.011(3) allows a contractor at any time to request that the retainage be reduced to one hundred percent of the value of the work remaining on the project. RCW 60.28.011(3)(a) allows release after completion of all contract work other than landscaping, with five percent of the moneys earned for landscaping continuing to be retained.

Small projects follow a different route, and the difference matters for anyone comparing the published files. RCW 39.12.040(2) provides an alternate procedure for "public works projects of $5,000 or less as allowed under RCW 39.04.152," under which the awarding agency may authorise a combined form instead of separate Intent and Affidavit filings. A separate Affidavit of Wages Paid record will therefore never exist for many of those contracts, and the absence of one says nothing at all about whether the job closed out or whether money is being held. Any comparison of the two published datasets that fails to exclude contracts at or below $5,000 will report a large number of those jobs as blocked when there is nothing to release.

Three years is where the character of the claim starts to change, and the citation usually given for that rule is out of date. Chapter 63.29 RCW, the Uniform Unclaimed Property Act, was repealed by 2022 c 225 § 1505 effective 1 January 2023; the operative chapter is now chapter 63.30 RCW. Under RCW 63.30.040(4), a debt of a business association is presumed abandoned three years after the obligation to pay arises. Being presumed abandoned is not the same thing as being forfeited. RCW 63.30.270(1) permits a local government, five years after property is presumed abandoned, to archive the records and transfer the property into its general fund — and then states that "the local government remains liable to pay the intangible property to a person or entity subsequently establishing its ownership of this intangible property." Old retainage becomes progressively harder to trace and harder to evidence long before it becomes genuinely irrecoverable.

HeldBack is not the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries, is not the awarding agency on any contract, and is not a law firm. Nothing on this page is legal advice. Every statutory passage quoted above was read from the published RCW text on 14 August 2026 and links to that text, and every figure quoted was fetched from data.wa.gov on the same day. A check result showing no approved Affidavit of Wages Paid means precisely that a matching approved record does not appear in L&I's published file — it is not a finding that any firm failed to file, and it is not a determination that money is owed to anyone.