Guides

Union Schedule A, Explained: Wages, Fringes, and the Total Package

Updated Jul 12, 2026

If you estimate union construction work, the Schedule A is the page your whole labor price starts from: the wage-and-fringe exhibit attached to the collective bargaining agreement, listing every classification's base wage, the employer contributions that ride each hour, and — in bold, near the bottom of the column — the Total Package. It is also one of the most misread documents in estimating, because it deliberately lists more numbers than belong in your cost, and it doesn't label which is which.

This guide walks a real rate line top to bottom: what each block means, what the Total Package actually includes, which lines are employer money and which are employee money that's already inside the wage — the distinction that decides whether your billable rate survives an audit.

In this guide:

• What a Schedule A actually is
• Reading a rate line, block by block
• The Total Package — what it is, and what it is not
• Employer contributions vs. employee deductions
• Which lines payroll taxes ride
• Premium tiers, shift tables, and per-hour fringes
• The reading traps
• From Schedule A to your billable rate

What a Schedule A actually is

A collective bargaining agreement is mostly rules — jurisdiction, hours, dispute procedures. The money lives in an attached schedule, almost always the first one, hence "Schedule A." Depending on the local and the trade you'll also see it called the wage schedule, wage sheet, Exhibit A, or just the rate sheet. Same document: a table of classifications down the side, and for each one the base wage, a stack of per-hour fund contributions, and usually a bolded total.

Two things make it the estimator's document rather than the payroll clerk's. First, it is the source of truth for what a union-shop labor hour will cost you — not a benchmark, not a survey, the actual negotiated numbers you will pay. Second, it changes on a schedule: agreements step on fixed dates (June 1 is common), and the schedule you're holding may already print the current step and the next one. Price a two-year job from the current column alone and the raise lands on you.

Reading a rate line, block by block

Here is the shape of one journeyman line from a pipe-trades agreement, laid out the way the schedule itself runs — wage, then the employer funds, then the bolded package, then the lines that live below it:

Run the addition and you'll see the schedule's own logic: $59.25 plus the six employer funds — $21.59 in all — is exactly the published $80.84 package. The $1.70 of lines below the rule is not in the package, and that's not an omission: those amounts are withheld from the $59.25 wage on the member's behalf. They're already inside a number you've counted once. That one distinction is the heart of reading a Schedule A, and we'll spend a whole section on it below.

Block by block:

• Classifications. Journeyman, foreman, general foreman, superintendent — each its own line, each with its own wage and sometimes its own fund amounts. Foreman tiers are usually a fixed add or percentage over journeyman; apprentices are published as percentages of the journeyman wage with their own (often reduced) fund rates.
• The wage block. The taxable, on-the-check hourly wage. Some schedules print separate wage columns per shift — hold that thought for the shift section.
• The employer funds. Health & welfare, pension (often local and national), annuity, training/apprenticeship, industry-promotion funds. Per-hour dollar amounts the employer remits to trust funds. They never touch the paycheck.
• The bolded total. Wage + employer funds. Some schedules label it Total Package, some "total economic package," some just bold it.
• The deduction lines. Working dues / dues check-off (often a percentage of gross wages rather than a flat amount), market recovery, small assessment funds, sometimes vacation. Employee-side.

The Total Package — what it is, and what it is not

The Total Package is the number everyone quotes — "carpenters are $64 an hour now" — and it's genuinely useful: it is your direct labor cost per hour, before statutory burdens. But both halves of that sentence matter, because the package is routinely mistaken for two things it isn't:

• It is not what the worker takes home. The funds never ride the check, and the deductions come out of the wage. The package is an employer-cost number, not a pay number — which is exactly why it's the right starting point for estimating.
• It is not your fully burdened cost. Nothing statutory is in it: no FICA, no Medicare, no unemployment, no workers' comp or general liability, no small tools or per-hour overhead. On the carpenters line we use across this guide series — $46.28 wage, $1.86 paid on the check, $15.93 to funds, a $64.07 package — the honest straight-time cost is $75.43 and the billable rate at a 15% margin is $88.74. The package was 85% of cost, not cost. The gap is the burden math covered in the fully burdened labor rate guide.

So treat the Total Package as the input: the number a labor rate build-up starts from, not a rate you could ever put on a contract.

Employer contributions vs. employee deductions

Every dollar figure on a Schedule A lands in one of three places, and the document rarely says which. Sorting them is the whole game:

The expensive mistake is the last row. Add the dues check-off or a withheld vacation on top of the wage and you have billed money that was already inside the wage — a double-count an auditor who knows the agreement will find in minutes, on every hour of the job. In the pipe-trades line above that's $1.70/hour of pure double-billing; on a 3,000-hour change order, $5,100 you'll be giving back with your credibility attached.

The trap has teeth because the same word can sit on either side, agreement to agreement. Vacation is the classic:

One carpenters agreement pays vacation as a $1.00/hour addition on the check — a real employer cost, taxable, in the package. Another withholds vacation from the wage into a vacation fund — employee money, already counted. Identical word, opposite treatment, and the only way to know is to read where the line lands: on top of the wage, or out of it.

Which lines payroll taxes ride

Once the employer/employee sort is done, one more sort matters for the burden math: of the employer-cost lines, which are taxable? The rule is where the money lands. Amounts paid on the paycheck — the wage and any wage-attached additions — carry every statutory burden: FICA, Medicare, unemployment, workers' comp. Contributions paid to trust funds do not. Run your ~13% of payroll burdens over the whole $80.84 package instead of the $59.25 that rides the check and you've invented about $2.80/hour of phantom burden on this one line. The full mechanics — bases, percentages, and a free three-tier calculator — are in the burdened-rate guide.

Premium tiers, shift tables, and per-hour fringes

A Schedule A also quietly answers the overtime question — and its answer is usually not "multiply by 1.5":

• Premium wages are often published. Many schedules print the true overtime and double-time wages per classification. Use them directly, and match the sheet's rounding convention — published premium wages are typically rounded to cents before anything else is computed.
• The funds are per hour, not per dollar. Most contributions are owed per hour worked — the same $15.93 whether the hour is straight time or double time. That flatness is why a billable OT rate is never 1.5× the ST rate; the LRBU guide quantifies the damage. (A few funds accrue per hour paid instead — the fund's own line will say so; read it rather than assuming either way.)
• Shifts get their own wage columns. Night and swing-shift differentials are usually baked into separate published wages, not left for you to multiply at runtime. In the pipe-trades agreement above, the day journeyman wage is $59.25 and the night journeyman wage is published separately as $68.14 — the 15% differential already inside the number, with the same fund stack on top. Price a night-shift scope from the day column and the schedule itself will contradict your rate sheet.

The premium wages are the rate half of overtime. The hours half — when the agreement's working rules send a day to OT or DT, and what 4×10s, Sundays, and holidays do to a priced week — is worked in Overtime & Double-Time Math.

The reading traps

1. Pricing from a stale step. Agreements step on fixed dates, and schedules often print the future steps right on the page. Check the effective-date header first, and if the job spans a step, price the hours on both sides of it.
2. Assuming every classification shares the fund stack. They often don't. In the pipe-trades agreement above, the journeyman's national pension is $2.80/hour where an apprentice's is $1.60, and the working assessment drops from $1.10 to $0.75. A blended-crew rate built on journeyman funds alone quietly overprices the apprentices.
3. Adding the below-the-line items. The double-count covered above — dues check-off, assessments, withheld vacation. Out of the wage, never on top.
4. Taxing the trust funds — or missing that a wage-attached addition is taxable. The base for statutory burdens is what rides the check, exactly.
5. Quoting the package as a rate. The Total Package is cost input. Statutory burdens, insurance, overhead, and your markup all still stack before a billable number exists — that's the build-up.

From Schedule A to your billable rate

Read correctly, a Schedule A gives you everything the cost side of a labor rate build-up needs: the taxable wage block, the per-hour employer contributions, and the published premium wages per tier. From there it's the burden math and your markup convention, per classification, per tier — and the deduction lines stay out of all of it.

The mechanical risk is the transcription: a schedule can carry a dozen classifications times a dozen funds, per shift, per step. CrewMix's AI agreement import reads the classification, wage, and contribution tables straight off the Schedule A PDF into a structured rate library — employer funds as cost, employee deductions left out of it — and every number lands side-by-side with the source document for review. From there the build-up editor prices every classification's ST, OT, and DT from its own wage, and estimates snapshot the rates so a mid-job step never silently reprices signed work.

However you do the math, do it from the document itself: current step, employer lines only, taxable and trust sorted — and the bolded number treated as the beginning of your rate, not the end of it.