Record it by day 90, and be ready for the day they cut your year to 60

Florida gives you 90 days from your own final furnishing to record a Claim of Lien, one year from recording to bring the action that enforces it, and 60 days in place of that year the moment an owner has the clerk serve a Notice of Contest of Lien. Every one of those windows is counted from a fact that lives on your job file rather than in the statute book.

Take a mechanical sub on a Cape Coral job carrying $46,800 unpaid against a $312,000 subcontract. Record on day 89 and that $46,800 is attached to a building somebody wants to sell, refinance or close on. Record on day 91 and the same $46,800 is an unsecured invoice with a polite tone on it. Two days apart on a calendar, 15 percent of the subcontract value apart in what you are actually holding.

By the end of this page you will have four things written on that job. The final furnishing date the 90 days run from. The recording date, with the 15 day service step sitting behind it. The one year enforcement date. And a decided response to each of the three instruments the other side can serve to compress all of it: the Notice of Contest of Lien at 60 days, the show cause summons at 20, and the demand for a sworn statement of account at 30.

This page is written against the 2025 Florida Statutes, and each rule carries the section it comes from so you can read the source yourself in about a minute.

Write your final furnishing date on the job before the crew demobilizes

The trigger is in s.713.08(5), and it is narrow on purpose. The claim of lien may be recorded "at any time during the progress of the work or thereafter but not later than 90 days after the final furnishing of the labor or services or materials by the lienor."

Read the last four words. By the lienor. Your 90 days run from your last real day on that job, not from the day the general contractor closed out, not from the certificate of occupancy, and not from the date on the invoice that went unpaid. A framer who finished in March and a painter who finished in July have different day 90s on the same building.

So the date has to be captured while somebody still remembers it. The last delivery ticket, the last timesheet, the last day the truck was on site: one of those is your trigger, and it belongs on the job record the week it happens rather than being reconstructed from text messages in November. Log it at demobilization rather than at the first missed payment, because by the first missed payment you are already 30 or 40 days into the window.

Treat a return visit to fix your own punch item as what it usually is, a warranty trip rather than a fresh furnishing that restarts the clock. Count from the real last day of work and you are counting the way a court will.

There is a fork worth knowing before you assume you have the full 90. Where the original contract is terminated under s.713.07(4), the window closes on the earlier of 90 days after that termination or 90 days after your final furnishing. That is a date somebody else's paperwork can set, so the day a termination lands on a job you are on, recount.

Recognize the four ways a good Florida claim dies quietly

None of these is a legal failure. They are all filing-cabinet failures.

The first is the sub who did the work, did it well, and finds out at day 100 that the 45 day Notice to Owner was the price of admission. Chapter 713 gives a lienor out of privity with the owner no lien at all without it, and it is served at the start of a job rather than at the end. That one is the Florida Notice to Owner, and it is the guide to read first if you are a sub or a supplier.

The second is counting in months. Ninety days is not three months. From a final furnishing on September 12, 2026, "three months" reads December 12 and day 90 is December 11. Record on the 12th and you recorded on day 91.

The third is the lien that was recorded on time and then sat. One year sounds generous in December and evaporates by the following autumn, especially while the payer is talking and the talking feels like progress.

The fourth is the envelope. The clerk serves a Notice of Contest at the last address on file, and the 60 days run from the clerk's certified service date rather than from the day it reaches the person who opens the mail.

Count the whole chain from one date

Here is a single Florida job with the dates worked out. Your dates will be your own, because only you know the day you first set foot on the site and the day you left it.

Six dates, two inputs. That is the whole point: once the first and last furnishing dates are written down, the rest of Chapter 713 is arithmetic, and arithmetic can be done in advance by somebody who is not panicking. Put your own two dates into the Florida lien deadline calculator and it counts the same chain, with the statute reference on each row.

The lien is recorded in the clerk's office of the county where the property sits, Lee County for that Cape Coral job and Miami-Dade, Orange or Hillsborough for the next one. Record early in the window. Electronic recording rejections, a legal description that came off the wrong parcel and a clerk's office that closes at five are cheap problems in week ten and expensive ones on day 90.

One piece of good news that is genuinely in the statute: under s.713.08(4)(a) an omission or an error in the claim of lien does not, in the trial court's discretion, prevent enforcement against somebody who has not been adversely affected by it. Florida punishes late far harder than it punishes imperfect. Get it recorded.

Serve the copy inside 15 days, because recording is not service

Recording puts the lien on the public record. It does not tell the owner anything, and s.713.08(4)(c) attaches a consequence to that gap: failure to serve the claim of lien in the manner provided in s.713.18 "before recording or within 15 days after recording shall render the claim of lien voidable to the extent that the failure or delay is shown to have been prejudicial to any person entitled to rely on the service."

Service under s.713.18(1) is hand delivery, or common carrier or registered, Global Express Guaranteed or certified mail with evidence of delivery, and posting on the site where neither of those can be accomplished. Under s.713.18(3)(a) it is effective when sent to the last address shown in the notice of commencement or any amendment to it, then the address on the building permit application, then the last known address.

That is why the recorded Notice of Commencement matters to a sub who did not record it. It carries the owner, lender and surety addresses that every later notice is served to, and pulling a copy at job setup means the day-90 package already has somewhere to go. The capture step is in the Florida Notice of Commencement.

Set the service reminder on the day you record, while the recording receipt is still in your hand. It is a five minute task at the end of a three month sequence, which is exactly the kind that gets dropped.

<!-- Capture belongs here later: the Job deadlines panel on a Florida deal with first and last furnishing entered, showing the Claim of Lien row due December 11, 2026 with "Fla. Stat. s.713.08(5)" under it. Ontario demo tenant will not do; needs a US-FL deal. -->

Answer a demand for a sworn statement of account inside 30 days

This one gets almost no airtime and it takes lien rights outright. Under s.713.16(2) an owner may serve a written demand that a lienor furnish "a written statement under oath of his or her account" showing the labor, services and materials and what has been paid. Failure or refusal to furnish it within 30 days after the demand, or the furnishing of a false or fraudulent statement, "deprives the person so failing or refusing to furnish such statement of his or her lien."

It arrives as an ordinary letter, usually in the middle of a dispute when correspondence from that address has stopped feeling urgent, and the 30 days do not care what else is happening on the job. Treat any written demand from an owner as a dated clock the moment it lands. The statute is fair about repeat demands: where nothing in the account has changed since your last sworn response, a failure to answer again does not cost you the lien.

Read the fork table the day anything is served on you

The one year in s.713.22(1) is the default, and the default is the version that gets repeated. Three instruments replace it with something much shorter, and each starts running from service rather than from receipt.

The Notice of Contest is the one to plan for. The owner or the owner's attorney files it with the clerk, the clerk records it and serves a copy on you under s.713.18, certifying the service date on the notice itself, and your enforcement period becomes "60 days from the date of service of this notice." If no action is brought in those 60 days the lien terminates automatically. There is no hearing, no motion and no order: the date passes and the security is gone.

The show cause route in s.713.21(4) is faster still. On a complaint by an interested party the clerk issues a summons requiring the lienor to show cause within 20 days after service why the lien should not be enforced by action or vacated and cancelled of record. Fail to show cause or to commence the action by the return date and the court orders cancellation.

Both are reasons to have a Florida construction lawyer already holding your file rather than meeting one on day 45 of a 60 day window. A recorded lien with clean dates, proof of service and a sworn statement already answered is a file a lawyer can act on in an afternoon.

Stop quoting the two Florida numbers that circulate wrong

Two figures repeat across contractor forums and article pages, and both are stale or misread.

The Notice of Commencement threshold. Pages still say the NOC is required when the direct contract exceeds $2,500. That was the pre-October 2023 value, raised by 2023 HB 331. The current s.713.135 trigger is a direct contract of more than $5,000, with repair or replacement of an existing HVAC system under $15,000 carved out.

The public job floor. It is widely written that the s.255.05 Notice to Contractor carries a 45 day floor. The floor sits on a different document. The sworn Notice of Nonpayment may be served no earlier than 45 days after first furnishing and no later than 90 days after final furnishing, while the Notice to Contractor's 45 days from commencing is a ceiling. Public property carries no lien at all, so on a bonded state, county or school board job the bond is the entire remedy: Florida public job bond claims runs that chain.

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 government side of a Florida lien is cheap, which is worth knowing before somebody sells you the idea that this is a big-ticket decision.

A two page Claim of Lien with four names on it costs $9 to record. Against the $46,800 balance in the example above, the security on that receivable costs about two hundredths of one percent of it. The enforcement action is the expensive end, and s.713.29 puts a reasonable attorney fee for trial, appeal or arbitration on the prevailing party, which is a large part of why a properly recorded lien tends to get settled rather than litigated.

One line item is decided long before any of this: what you are entitled to record. Section 713.08(1)(g) has the claim state the amount unpaid "for such labor or services or materials and for unpaid finance charges due under the lienor's contract," so a finance charge that exists in your contract and on your invoices is a finance charge that can ride into the lien. Getting that language onto the paperwork is in invoicing Florida jobs and getting paid.

Fifteen Florida clocks are seeded with their statute references, from the Notice to Owner and the Claim of Lien through to the Sunbiz annual report and the August 31 license renewal. On a Florida deal, the Job deadlines panel takes the job facts you type once, counts the ones it can, and shows each row with its date, the basis it was counted on and the section it comes from, with a badge when one is due soon or overdue. A date it does not have stays blank rather than becoming a guess.

Open the deal for your slowest-paying Florida job, put the first and final furnishing dates into the Job deadlines panel, and read the Chapter 713 rows it counts back at you. If the day-90 row is closer than you thought, that is the afternoon this page was written for.