Wage Theft in Roofing (2026): DOL Back Wages and Violation Rates

A data brief by The Roofing Brief Team. Figures cited inline to named primary sources. Last reviewed July 2026.

Headline finding: Applying the national construction misclassification rate of 12% to 21% (Ormiston, Belman and Erlich, 2020) to the roofing workforce of 166,700 workers (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2024) yields an estimated 20,000 to 35,000 roofing workers who are likely misclassified as independent contractors or paid off the books in a typical month. That estimate is this brief’s original synthesis, not a measured roofing-specific count, and the methodology and limits are stated below. Wage theft in roofing is not a set of isolated bad actors: federal enforcement, academic prevalence studies, and state audits all point to a trade where underpayment is structural.

How much wage theft happens in roofing?

Wage theft in roofing most often takes the form of unpaid overtime, misclassification as independent contractors, and off-the-books cash pay. No agency publishes a single roofing-only prevalence figure, so the scale is triangulated from three data streams: U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Wage and Hour Division recoveries, peer-reviewed construction payroll-fraud studies, and state audit programs. Each is a partial view, and together they describe a trade with above-average exposure.

The clearest hard number is recovered back wages. In fiscal year 2023, the DOL Wage and Hour Division recovered more than $35.5 million in back wages for construction workers across 2,134 cases, the highest dollar total of any industry that year (DOL Wage and Hour Division, FY2023). Roofing sits inside that construction total, and individual roofing judgments regularly run into six and seven figures.

The largest DOL back-wage recoveries against roofing contractors

Federal roofing enforcement clusters around one violation: paying installers a flat piece rate or day rate and then not paying the time-and-one-half overtime premium once they pass 40 hours in a week. The table below ranks recent DOL Wage and Hour Division roofing judgments by back wages recovered. Each row is drawn from a DOL press release, so these are confirmed recoveries, not allegations.

Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division news releases, 2021 to 2026. Amounts include back wages and, where noted separately, civil money penalties. “Reported” denotes a DOL-confirmed recovery for which the release year was not captured in this dataset.

Two patterns stand out. First, the piece-rate trap is the recurring mechanism: at Citadel Roofing & Solar, investigators found installers paid by the piece averaged 47 hours a week while payroll recorded only 40 (DOL Wage and Hour Division, 2021). Second, penalties can rival the back wages: the $319,550 civil penalty in that case was, at the time, the second highest ever assessed by the division’s Western region (DOL Wage and Hour Division, 2021).

How does roofing rank within construction for wage violations?

Construction is the single largest source of federal back-wage recoveries, and roofing carries several of the risk factors that concentrate violations. The trade is heavily residential, heavily subcontracted, and staffed disproportionately by immigrant and Hispanic workers, the three characteristics that construction wage-theft researchers most consistently link to underpayment (UC Berkeley Labor Center, 2022).

Across all of construction, a landmark national study estimated that in an average month of 2017, between 12% and 21% of construction workers were misclassified as independent contractors or paid strictly off the books, rising to 13% to 22% in the peak summer building months (Ormiston, Belman and Erlich, 2020). The same study found construction had the most misclassification of any industry, and calculated that payroll fraud let contractors cut labor costs by $6.2 billion to $11.7 billion a year (Ormiston, Belman and Erlich, 2020).

The off-the-books share matters most for roofing crews. The UC Berkeley Labor Center estimated that roughly 1.2 million U.S. construction workers are paid entirely off the books, and that 39% of construction worker families rely on at least one safety-net program, at a public cost of about $28 billion a year (Jacobs, Huang, MacGillvary and Lopezlira, UC Berkeley Labor Center, 2022).

What is roofer misclassification, and why does it enable wage theft?

Misclassification is labeling a worker who functions as an employee as an “independent contractor” or a “1099 subcontractor.” It is the gateway to most roofing wage theft because a worker treated as a contractor can be denied overtime, minimum wage, workers’ compensation, and unemployment insurance, and bears the full payroll-tax burden themselves. Classifying a roofer as a contractor rather than an employee cuts a contractor’s labor cost by about 26% (Hennepin County Attorney, 2021).

Misclassification also underbids honest firms. A contractor who dodges payroll taxes, overtime, and workers’ compensation premiums can quote a lower price on the same roof, which pressures compliant competitors to cut corners too. Because roofing carries some of the highest workers’ compensation rates in construction, the premium avoided per misclassified roofer is larger than in most other trades (UC Berkeley Labor Center, 2022).

Where is construction misclassification worst? State audit rates

State studies that audit construction payrolls give the closest thing to a prevalence map. Rates vary widely by state and by method, but every study finds construction misclassification well above the all-industry baseline. These figures cover all construction trades, not roofing alone, and roofing plausibly runs at or above the construction average given its residential and subcontracted structure.

Sources: state misclassification studies compiled by the Hennepin County Attorney (2021) and the Foundation for Fair Contracting (2023). Rates are not directly comparable because studies differ in whether they count firms or workers and in the years measured.

In Minnesota specifically, researchers estimated about 30,100 construction workers, or 23% of the state’s construction workforce, were misclassified or paid off the books, and that those workers earned about 36% less, near $29,700 a year less, than lawfully employed peers (Goodell and Manzo, cited in Hennepin County Attorney, 2021).

Why are roofers especially exposed to wage theft?

Roofing concentrates the exact conditions that drive construction wage theft. The work is short-duration and residential, so crews cycle through many small jobs where oversight is thin. Pay is frequently structured as a piece rate or a day rate, which is where the unpaid-overtime cases originate. And the workforce skews toward immigrant and Hispanic labor, groups that studies repeatedly identify as most likely to experience wage theft and least able to challenge it (UC Berkeley Labor Center, 2022).

• Piece-rate and day-rate pay. Flat pay per square or per day masks hours worked, so the overtime premium disappears once a crew passes 40 hours (DOL Wage and Hour Division, 2021).
• Labor brokers and layered subcontracting. A prime hires a “labor-only” subcontractor who pays workers in cash with no withholding, distancing the general contractor from liability (UC Berkeley Labor Center, 2022).
• High workers’ compensation cost. Roofing’s injury and fatality profile makes its comp premiums among the steepest in construction, so misclassification saves employers more per worker.
• Immigration-status pressure. Threats to report workers to immigration authorities are documented as a tool to avoid paying wages in construction, including on roofing crews (findings summarized by CPWR and press reporting, 2025).

For the wider labor picture behind these figures, see The Roofing Brief’s Roofing Workforce Demographics Report on who roofs America, and the 2026 Roofing Labor Wage Report on pay and the workforce shortage.

What counts as wage theft on a roofing crew?

Wage theft is any failure to pay a worker all wages legally earned. On roofing jobs it typically appears as one or more of the following, each of which can trigger DOL Wage and Hour Division back-wage liability under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Whether a given practice is unlawful can depend on state law and on the worker’s true employment status.

1. Unpaid overtime. Not paying time-and-one-half for hours past 40 in a workweek, the most common roofing violation in DOL cases.
2. Misclassification. Treating an employee as a 1099 contractor to avoid overtime, minimum wage, and payroll taxes.
3. Off-the-clock work. Not counting travel between jobs, load-in, or setup as paid time.
4. Cash pay with no records. Paying off the books, which erases the paper trail a worker needs to prove hours.
5. Minimum-wage shortfalls. Piece-rate earnings that, divided by actual hours, fall below the applicable minimum wage.
6. Prevailing-wage violations. On public roofing projects, paying below the required Davis-Bacon or state prevailing rate.

A worker who suspects unpaid wages can file a confidential complaint with the DOL Wage and Hour Division, which may investigate regardless of immigration status. Many states also run their own wage-claim processes with shorter timelines. Roofers comparing pay and conditions across trades can review the Roofing vs the Other Skilled Trades report and current roofer pay by state.

Methodology note

This brief triangulates three source types. First, back-wage recoveries come directly from U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division news releases (2021 to 2026), each naming the employer, dollar amount, and worker count. Second, prevalence figures come from peer-reviewed and university research, principally Ormiston, Belman and Erlich (2020) and the UC Berkeley Labor Center (2022), plus state studies compiled by the Hennepin County Attorney (2021) and the Foundation for Fair Contracting (2023). Third, the roofing workforce base of 166,700 comes from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook (2024 data). The headline estimate multiplies that workforce by the national construction misclassification and off-books range of 12% to 21% (Ormiston, Belman and Erlich, 2020) to produce a defensible order-of-magnitude figure of 20,000 to 35,000 affected roofing workers.

Limitations note

These figures are directional, not precise. DOL back-wage totals capture only detected and litigated cases, so they are a floor on actual theft, not a measure of prevalence. No published study isolates a roofing-only misclassification rate, so the headline estimate applies the all-construction rate as a proxy; roofing may run above that average given its residential, piece-rate, and immigrant-heavy structure, which would make the true figure higher. State audit rates are not directly comparable because they differ in method, in whether they count firms or workers, and in year. Prevalence studies center on misclassification and off-the-books pay and do not capture every form of underpayment. Readers should treat all ranges as conditional estimates that vary by state, employment structure, and enforcement intensity.

Reviewed by The Roofing Brief Team. Last reviewed July 2026.