Finish a public works job in Washington and five percent of your contract does not arrive with the final payment. RCW 60.28.011 caps retainage at five percent of the moneys earned and makes the awarding agency hold it in trust. Releasing it has a condition: under RCW 39.12.040 every contractor and every subcontractor must file an Affidavit of Wages Paid, certified by L&I's industrial statistician, before the disbursing officer may let the money go. An agency that pays out early is liable to the workers for the wages due, so nobody at the city can waive it as a favour.
Nobody writes to a fourth-tier drywall sub to say it left money at a school district in 2023.
Watch the HeldBack — Retainage stays frozen until the Affidavit clears demo
Both halves of that are published
Washington publishes both filings. Intent Project Details carries about 1.3 million rows, one per company per job, filed before the work. Affidavit Project Details carries about 1.18 million, filed after, each row pointing back at the Intent it clears. An Intent old enough for the job to be finished, with no Affidavit against it, is a contract where somebody's own five percent is probably still sitting at a city, a port or a school district.
HeldBack's free check runs that comparison live, per request, against the state's service. There is no copy of either file kept here, because a copy would let it answer today's question with last month's data.
Most missing affidavits are not money
The comparison on its own is close to useless. An absent Affidavit means something different at every size and age, and three of the four meanings are not a debt.
| The row | Why no Affidavit shows against it | What the check does with it |
|---|---|---|
| Contract at or under $5,000 | The Affidavit is folded into the combined Intent form and never appears separately | Dropped before anything is counted |
| Expected start inside 24 months | The work is not finished, so there is nothing to release yet | Dropped |
| Expected start 24 to 48 months | The condition on release has not been met | Counted, at the five percent cap |
| Expected start older than 48 months | Under RCW 63.30.040(4) a business debt is presumed abandoned three years after the obligation arises | Dropped from the total, rather than shown with an asterisk |
| Contract over $2,000,000 | Usually the job is still being built | Counted, and the packet prints a caution above the letter |
That last band is the honest exception. A $1.4B highway prime with no Affidavit on file is not sitting on frozen retainage, and the packet says so in plain words rather than quietly withholding the row.
Presumed abandoned is not forfeited, which is worth knowing on the phone: RCW 63.30.270(1) lets a local government move such property into its general fund after five years, and in the same sentence says it remains liable to pay whoever later establishes ownership.
The file has two dollar columns and one of them is a trap
amount is the value of the whole project, repeated identically on every company's row. On one Spokane airport contract, fifteen firms each show $34,025,597. cntrct_amt is the filer's own contract, and across 1,420 values the two agree only five times. Telling a sub owed three thousand dollars that he has $34M locked up ends the conversation. Nothing HeldBack prints comes from amount.
What a buyer gets
The check is free. The $59 closeout packet covers one contract in six parts: contract record sheet, filing checklist, release request letter, affidavit status letter, agency contact sheet, and a prime chain map listing everyone who filed an Intent on the same job with each one's affidavit status. One PDF, made to print. The $15/month watch re-runs the comparison daily and writes only when the answer moves, which happens on an Intent's own anniversary rather than the first of the month.
Every sentence in every deliverable says the same thing: no approved Affidavit appears in L&I's published file on this date. Publication lags filing, HeldBack never files on anyone's behalf, and the five percent is the statutory ceiling rather than a balance the agency has confirmed, which is precisely what the letter on page 4 asks them to state.
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