H-2A Guide · Compliance

Surviving a DOL Audit: The H-2A Compliance Checklist

When a Wage & Hour investigator calls, they already know what they’re going to ask for. This guide is that list — payroll against the AEWR, the ¾ guarantee math, housing, transport, reimbursements, and recruitment records — so your audit file exists before the phone rings, not after.

Updated August 2026 · ~9 min read · Not legal advice — enforcement details vary; verify current rules at flag.dol.gov

The key numbers

3 years — the standard retention period for H-2A records, including the recruitment report
¾ — the fraction of contract-period workdays you must offer (and pay for, if not offered)
$14.83–$20.08/hr — 2026 AEWR range; every payroll hour is checked against your state’s rate
50% — the contract midpoint by which inbound travel and subsistence must be reimbursed (sometimes effectively sooner)
$16.78/day — the 2026 cap on meal charges, a favorite line for auditors to recompute

How H-2A investigations actually start

DOL’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) opens H-2A investigations from worker complaints, referrals from consulates and legal-aid groups, tips from competitors, and its own targeting of agricultural employers — you do not need to have done anything wrong to be selected. Investigations typically open with a records request and often include worker interviews conducted without you in the room. Penalties for substantiated violations range from back wages to civil money penalties to, in serious cases, debarment from the program — which for an H-2A-dependent operation is an existential outcome.

The single most important thing to understand: an audit is a document exam. Investigators rarely watch you work; they read what you kept. An employer with complete, contemporaneous records and a small honest error generally does far better than an employer with clean conduct and chaotic paper. What follows is what they read.

The checklist: what investigators ask for

Request #1 · Payroll vs. the AEWR

Complete payroll records, hour by hour

Expect to produce, for every worker (H-2A and corresponding U.S. workers alike): hours offered, hours worked, earnings per pay period, deductions itemized, and pay stubs matching the job order’s stated wage. The investigator recomputes pay against the highest applicable rate — usually your state’s AEWR (roughly $14.83–$20.08/hr in 2026, state-dependent).

Common failure: piece rates that don’t “true up.” If workers are paid by the bucket or bin, their effective hourly earnings each pay period must still meet the AEWR — and you must have the hours records to prove it. No hours log means no defense.

Request #2 · The ¾ guarantee

Proof you offered enough work — with the arithmetic

The three-quarters guarantee says you must offer employment for at least 75% of the workdays in the contract period. If weather, market, or scheduling means you offered less, you owe the difference in pay. Investigators do this math themselves, so you should have done it first:

Contract: 20 weeks × 6 days × 8 hrs = 960 hrs offered on paper
Guarantee: 960 × 0.75 = 720 hrs
Actually offered: 640 hrs → shortfall 80 hrs × AEWR = back pay owed per worker

You need daily records of hours offered (not just worked) — including days a worker declined work, which count toward your side of the ledger only if documented at the time.

Common failure: no record of offered-but-declined hours. Reconstructed after the fact, they are routinely disallowed, and the “shortfall” becomes back wages for the whole crew.

Request #3 · Housing

Inspection certificates and upkeep records

Housing must have passed inspection against OSHA/DOL standards before occupancy — investigators want the certificate, plus evidence conditions were maintained all season: occupancy counts against the certified limit, repair logs, utility service. Free of charge to workers means exactly that; any housing-related deduction on a pay stub is a finding waiting to happen.

Common failure: housing that passed in April, deteriorated by July, and shows up in worker interview notes. Periodic documented walk-throughs are cheap insurance.

Request #4 · Transportation

Vehicle safety, insurance, and driver records

Daily worker transport must meet federal vehicle safety standards, carry required insurance, and use properly licensed drivers. Expect requests for insurance certificates, inspection records, and driver qualifications for every vehicle that carried workers. If a contractor drives your crew, their compliance is functionally your problem.

Common failure: the borrowed van. One undocumented vehicle in ad-hoc use can put a finding on an otherwise clean file.

Request #5 · Reimbursements

Travel and subsistence: amounts and timing

Investigators check that inbound travel and subsistence were reimbursed by the 50% point of the contract — and they know federal minimum-wage rules can effectively require reimbursing some costs in the first workweek. They also check outbound travel for workers who completed the contract, and they look hard for any recruitment fees charged to workers, which are flatly illegal and typically treated as employer liability regardless of who collected them.

Common failure: reimbursements paid in cash with no receipts, or paid late. Timing is checkable from your own payroll dates — keep the proof, not just the intention.

Request #6 · Recruitment

The recruitment report and U.S. worker records

H-2A rests on the legal claim that U.S. workers were unavailable, so you must retain the recruitment report and related records — every U.S. applicant, the disposition of each, and lawful job-related reasons for any rejection — for three years. Rejecting a qualified U.S. applicant, or being unable to document why a rejection was lawful, jeopardizes the certification itself.

Common failure: the report was filed once and never kept. “It’s in the FLAG system somewhere” is not a records-retention strategy.

Continuous record-keeping beats scrambling — every time

Read back through that list and notice the pattern: almost nothing an investigator wants can be created retroactively. Hours offered, walk-through logs, ride records, reimbursement receipts — these are only credible if they were captured when they happened. The employers who have bad audits are rarely the ones who broke rules on purpose; they are the ones who ran a decent season and then spent three panicked weeks trying to reconstruct it from memory, text messages, and a shoebox.

This is the problem H2A Link’s system was built around, so here is our pitch, stated plainly so you can discount it appropriately: every worker on our platform carries a badge tied to their visa status, I-94, hours, rides, and meals. Scans at the bus and the field gate write the ledger as the season runs — hours against the AEWR, the ¾ guarantee tally, reimbursement dates, housing checkpoints — and the whole audit file exports in one click the day an investigator calls. We can’t promise you’ll never be investigated (nobody honest can), and software doesn’t fix genuinely non-compliant practices. What it does is make the compliant season you actually ran provable. The same discipline works fine on paper, too — it just has to happen daily, which in our experience is exactly what stops happening by mid-July.

When to bring in a lawyer

Some situations are beyond any checklist or platform: a WHD investigation that turns adversarial, allegations involving worker treatment, debarment proceedings, or anything criminal-adjacent. H2A Link is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice — when matters get complex we refer clients to licensed immigration and labor counsel, and if you are already facing an active enforcement action, calling a lawyer before producing records is simply good sense.

Before the season, not after

Compliance is cheapest when it’s designed in at filing time: the job order you submit 60 days out (see the H-2A timeline) defines the contract every record must match, and the wage and reimbursement obligations above are most of your budget (itemized in what H-2A really costs). Shorter questions — retention periods, who counts as a corresponding worker, what an investigator can request — are in the FAQ.

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