Take the deposit, then start the two clocks that make the homeowner glad they wrote the check

You are the contractor on a $64,000 room addition in Pasco County. You want 30 percent up front, which is $19,200, because the impact glass and the truss package get paid for before anybody is on site. The homeowner says yes and the money clears on a Friday. Good job, good terms, and Florida has no rule against it.

What the money buys, along with the windows, is two dates. Under Fla. Stat. s.489.126(2)(a) an initial payment totaling more than 10 percent of the contract price starts a 30 day clock to apply for the permits and a 90 day clock to start the work, and s.489.126(5) grades a breach of that on the total money received, not on whatever is left of it by the time anyone asks. So the number on the table is not the $4,000 you have not spent yet. It is the whole $19,200, which lands in the band s.489.126(5)(b) calls a felony of the third degree, being $1,000 or more but less than $20,000. Write the same 30 percent into a $70,000 contract and the deposit is $21,000, which crosses into s.489.126(5)(c), a felony of the second degree. One extra bathroom moved the grading band, and meaning well does not reach in here: s.489.126(4)(c) says the fact that the person charged intended to return the money owed is not a defense.

By the end of this page you will have a deposit percentage chosen on purpose, two dates on the job file counted from the two events the statute names, a signed longer period paragraph for the jobs that need one, a draw schedule that leaves the second offense nothing to measure, and a current address inside your own contract so a certified letter reaches you while there is time to answer it. All of it is written against the 2025 Florida Statutes, with the subsection on each rule.

Read it as a sales page. The reason a Florida homeowner hands $19,200 to somebody they met three weeks ago is that Florida pre-built their remedies before either of you showed up. That machinery is on your side of the table, and it closes jobs when you explain it first.

Set the deposit against the contract price, because 10 percent is the switch

Section 489.126(2)(a) attaches to a contractor "who receives, as initial payment, money totaling more than 10 percent of the contract price for repair, restoration, improvement, or construction to residential real property." Three details in that sentence decide whether the clocks are running on your job.

It says more than 10 percent, not 10 percent or more, so a deposit of exactly 10 percent sits under the switch. It measures the initial payment against the contract price, so the denominator is the signed number, not your cost and not the revised figure after the change order. And it has no floor. A $3,000 water heater swap with a $900 deposit is inside the section as firmly as the addition.

So there are two ways to run a Florida residential business. Stay at or below 10 percent and fund the long lead items yourself. Or take the deposit you actually need and take the two dates with it, which is the better business and the subject of the rest of this page.

One line in s.489.126(1) is worth knowing when you quote against somebody cheaper. The section defines contractor to include "any person performing or contracting or promising to perform work described therein, without regard to the licensure of the person." The unlicensed handyman taking a deposit on the same addition is in the same statute, on the same clocks, in the same bands. Being licensed is not what puts you in this section. It is what lets you finish the job that gets you out of it, and the route to it is your Florida contractor's license.

Say both clocks out loud at the table before the homeowner asks

This move is free and hardly anyone makes it.

The homeowner across from you has read something about deposits. They have a cousin who lost $8,000 to a pool contractor, or they saw the news after a hurricane season. When you ask for 30 percent, the fear that makes them hesitate is not that you build badly. It is that the money leaves and nothing happens.

So answer it before it is asked, in one sentence, with numbers. The deposit is $19,200, Florida gives me 30 days from the day it clears to get the permit application in and 90 days from the day the last permit issues to get a crew on site, and both dates go in the contract.

That turns an open-ended worry into two dates they can check, and it moves the conversation off percentage haggling, because what they were buying with a smaller deposit was certainty and you just handed them more of it. Then write both dates into the contract beside the deposit line, on the same page as the recovery fund statement and the lien law warning. The four blocks that page carries are in the Florida residential contract guide.

Count the 30 off the money and the 90 off the paper

The two clocks run from different events, and having them the wrong way round is what puts a contractor into breach while feeling comfortably early.

Section 489.126(2)(a)1 requires you to "apply for permits necessary to do work within 30 days after the date payment is made, except where the work does not require a permit under the applicable codes and ordinances." The event is the date payment is made. Not the contract date, not the day the drawings come back, not the day the engineer stamps the trusses. Your bank record already holds it.

Notice what that subparagraph asks. It asks you to apply, not to get anything issued inside 30 days, which is fortunate, because you would have no control over that. A rejected submittal followed by a resubmittal is a record of you working the counter. An empty file on day 31 is the problem.

Section 489.126(2)(a)2 then requires you to "start the work within 90 days after the date all necessary permits for work, if any, are issued." That one runs from permit issuance. Read "all necessary permits" as written: where your subs pull separate electrical, mechanical and plumbing permits alongside the building permit, the clock starts at the last issuance, which is the friendlier date.

The dangerous mistake is swapping them: a contractor who believes the 30 days starts at permit issuance sits on the application through March and April and is in breach of (2)(a)1 before the county has seen a drawing.

A second 90 runs on the same job. Under s.713.13(2), if the improvement described in a recorded Notice of Commencement is not commenced within 90 days after recording, that notice is void and of no further effect. Different event, same length, counted in the Notice of Commencement guide.

Get the longer period in writing, from the person whose money it was

Some jobs cannot meet those dates honestly. A truss package on a sixteen week lead, a variance hearing that sets its own date. Florida wrote the answer into the same paragraph, and it costs a sentence.

The flush clause closing s.489.126(2)(a) excuses both duties where "the person who made the payment agreed, in writing, to a longer period to apply for the necessary permits or start the work or to longer periods for both." Note who signs. If the deposit came off the wife's account, hers is the signature that counts. If a parent funded a granny flat, the paragraph goes to the parent, not the adult child living in the house.

That clause also excuses a contractor with "just cause," which the statute never defines. What it does instead, at s.489.126(2)(b)2, is tell a factfinder when they may infer its absence, a machine that runs against you rather than for you. So write the date down: the parties agree the contractor has until September 30 to apply for the necessary permits, because the structural engineering is scheduled for completion on September 12. Signed by the person who paid, kept with the contract rather than in a text thread.

Tie every draw to the value in place so the second offense has nothing to measure

Subsection (2) is the deposit offense. Subsection (3) is a separate one, arriving later in the job, and it catches solvent contractors who are simply busy elsewhere.

Section 489.126(3)(a) says a contractor who receives money for residential work "in excess of the value of the work performed may not fail or refuse to perform any work for any 90-day period or for any period that is mutually agreed upon and specified in the contract." Two things live there. It only bites while you hold more than the work is worth, a condition sitting inside your own draw schedule. And the 90 days is a default that a specified contract period displaces, a drafting lever sitting unused in most residential contracts.

Then look at the pricing. Section 489.126(6) grades a subsection (3) violation on "the total money received exceeding the value of the work performed." The dollar breakpoints are word for word identical to subsection (5). The measured quantity is not.

Subsection (5) measures the whole payment. Subsection (6) measures the overhang. A draw schedule that keeps each payment level with the value in place drives that overhang toward zero, and zero has no band to fall into. Publish the value in place alongside each draw percentage and the homeowner agrees the relationship up front, which is when agreeing it is cheap.

One more habit falls out of s.489.126(3)(b), which makes the overhang prima facie evidence where there was no work for 90 days without just cause, or where the contract was terminated without proper notification. That notification has a prescribed form at s.489.126(3)(b)3.a: a letter giving the reason, certified mail with return receipt requested, to the owner's address in the agreement. Walking away from a residential job in Florida is a letter, not a phone call.

Answer the certified letter inside 30 days, at the address in your own contract

Neither offense fires straight off a missed date. Both route through a written demand with a prescribed form.

Section 489.126(2)(b)1 requires the contractee to make written demand "in the form of a letter that includes a demand to apply for the necessary permits, to start the work, or to refund the payment sent via certified mail, return receipt requested, mailed to the address listed in the contracting agreement." Read that as a delivery instruction aimed at you, because it is. The letter goes to the address in your own contract. A template still carrying the unit you moved out of two years ago sends the one piece of mail that matters to a door you do not open, and the clock runs anyway. Auditing that address block is the highest value five minutes on this page.

What the letter starts is at s.489.126(2)(b)2: it may be inferred that a contractor lacks just cause if he fails to apply for the necessary permits, start the work, or refund payments "within 30 days of receiving written demand." Section 489.126(4)(b) runs the same 30 days at the intent element, allowing an inference that the contractor appropriated the money where he fails to refund any portion of it within 30 days of a demand.

So the letter is not the end of anything. It is a 30 day window in which three answers all work: get the application in, get a crew on site, or refund. Partial performance counts too, since (4)(b) speaks of "any portion." A reply that goes back the same week, naming which of the three you are doing and the date it happens, is worth more than every hour of worry that would otherwise fill the month.

Shutting that door shuts others. Section 489.129(1)(j) presumes a project abandoned after 90 consecutive days without just cause or without proper notification, and abandonment is a predicate the Florida Homeowners' Construction Recovery Fund runs on under s.489.141(1)(b). One stalled job, three doors, one calendar.

Keep the money wherever you like, and pay the people who already earned it

Now the part that is more permissive than contractors expect.

Section 489.126 is not a trust account rule. It carries no requirement to escrow the deposit, hold it or segregate it, and the words trust, escrow and separate account appear nowhere in the section. Every verb it commands is a performance verb: apply for permits, start the work, do not fail or refuse to perform. A Florida residential deposit can be banked in the operating account and spent on the job it was collected for, and that is not the offense. The offense is a date. If the deposit were trust money, spending it would be the wrong at the moment of spending. Instead s.489.126(4)(a) goes looking for an appropriation in time, allowing intent to be shown "at the time that the contractor appropriated the money to his or her own use" rather than when the owner handed it over.

The nearest thing Florida has to a funds rule sits in a different chapter and the two get blended constantly. Section 713.345(1)(a) requires a person receiving payment on account of improving real property to apply such portion of it to "all amounts then due and owing for services and labor which were performed on, or materials which were furnished for, such improvement prior to receipt of the payment," while preserving withholding under the contract or in a bona fide dispute. That is an application of funds rule, not a segregated account rule, and its ladder runs the other way and is all felonies: under s.713.345(1)(b)3 a misapplication of less than $1,000 is a felony of the third degree, where the same figure under s.489.126(5)(a) is a misdemeanor of the first degree.

So the rule that satisfies both is short. The money is yours to move, the portion covering labor already performed and materials already furnished goes to the people who performed and furnished, and the rest funds this job. Paying last month's crew out of next month's deposit is where a solvent business turns into a chain, and the chain is what both statutes catch.

What it costs

There is no monthly subscription. The platform fee is 2.5% of each invoice processed through AEC Stack, collected on payment due dates.

The deposit itself costs nothing. Everything below is what the state attaches to the dates around it:

Every row there is priced off a date a job record already knows. The deposit percentage is the payment divided by the contract value, both of which exist the moment you write the quote. The 30 day date is the payment date plus thirty, and the 90 day date is the last permit issue date plus ninety. On AEC Stack the Florida job record carries fifteen statute-referenced clocks of that exact shape, each showing the section it comes from and the consequence in plain words, from the 45 day Notice to Owner under s.713.06(2)(a) to the 90 day claim of lien under s.713.08(5). Record the deposit and the permit dates, and this page becomes arithmetic on facts the job already holds.

Open the contract template you actually send and do two things this afternoon. Check the address block, because that is where the certified letter goes, and a stale one is thirty days you never knew you had. Then add a line under the deposit: the date the permit application goes in, and the date work starts counted from permit issue. Both are a selling point rather than a concession, and they are what the homeowner was really asking about when they hesitated over the percentage. If the Florida side is not set up yet, start at start your business.

<!-- CAPTURE LATER: a Florida job record with the deposit recorded against contract value and the permit dates entered, showing the s.489.126(2)(a)1 and (2)(a)2 dates on the job calendar. Blocked in this wave: the demo tenant is Ontario. -->