Serve one page by day 45 and the Florida job stays lienable

You are the drywall sub on a retail buildout in Hillsborough County. The subcontract is $61,400, two draws came through for $24,000, and then the general stopped answering. Balance owed: $61,400 minus $24,000, so $37,400. You call around about a lien, and the first question anybody competent asks is not how much you are owed. It is what date you served the Notice to Owner. If nobody served one, the rest of the conversation is short. That $37,400 is ordinary unsecured debt, and the building your work is screwed to has nothing to do with you.

Florida is blunt about this in a way most states are not. Under Fla. Stat. s.713.06(2)(a), "All lienors under this section, except laborers, as a prerequisite to perfecting a lien under this chapter and recording a claim of lien, must serve a notice on the owner." Prerequisite is the operative word. There is no reduced claim, no partial lien, no cure. A sub or supplier who did not serve the notice never had lien rights on that job at all.

By the end of this page you will have four things: a sorted list of which of your live jobs need a Notice to Owner and which do not, the calendar date day 45 lands on for each one, a mailing date five days earlier that makes the postmark itself the date of service, and one notice assembled from a real job's own facts sitting on that job's record waiting for you to check and send. Every date is counted from your first furnishing day, which is the one number nobody but you can supply.

All of it is written against the 2025 Florida Statutes, with the section on each rule so you can check any of it in a minute.

Sort your jobs by who signed your contract, before you count any dates

The whole question is privity. Not job size, not trade, not residential against commercial. If the owner signed your contract, s.713.06 is not aimed at you. If anybody else signed it, a general contractor, another sub, a builder's own construction arm, you are a lienor not in privity with the owner and this notice is your ticket in.

That fourth row is narrow: the laborer exemption covers a person selling labor, not a labor-only subcontract company running a crew and invoicing for it. If you invoice as a business, assume you are serving a notice.

Two rows can be true of you in the same week, because role is per contract and not per company. Direct with a homeowner on Tuesday, third-tier supplier on Thursday, one job needing nothing and the other on a 45 day fuse. Stamp the role on the job file the day you sign, and this stops being research later.

Count the 45 days from your first day of furnishing, not from the contract

Here is the rule in full, because both halves of it bite. A lienor must serve the notice "before commencing, or not later than 45 days after commencing, to furnish his or her labor, services, or materials, but, in any event, before the date of the owner's disbursement of the final payment." Two ceilings, and you are held to whichever arrives first.

Day 45 from first furnishing. First furnishing is the first day you actually put labor, services or materials into that job. A pallet of block delivered to the site and left there starts it. A signed contract does not, and neither does the preconstruction meeting or the day you raised your first invoice. Deliver material in February, send a crew in April, and February is your trigger.

The owner's final disbursement. The notice also has to land before the owner pays out final payment against the contractor's final payment affidavit under s.713.06(3)(d). On a fast job that arrives well inside 45 days. The statute explicitly lets you serve before you commence, and a notice served on day one can never be caught by either ceiling.

Now the detail that turns the deadline into a habit. Under s.713.18(2), a notice sent by registered, Global Express Guaranteed or certified mail with postage prepaid is effective as of the date of mailing, provided "the notice is mailed within 40 days after the date the lienor first furnishes labor, services, or materials." Inside 40 days the postmark is your proof and delivery timing stops mattering. Past 40 days you are relying on it reaching the owner by day 45, through a mailroom you do not control.

So the working deadline on every Florida job is day 40. Day 45 is the theoretical one, and it belongs to people who have already made a mistake.

Put one real job on one calendar and read every date off it

Take the Hillsborough buildout. First furnishing March 3, 2026, final furnishing June 26, 2026. Those two dates are yours to supply. Everything else falls out of them.

Two dates in, six entries out. The Florida lien deadline calculator takes your role, your first and last furnishing dates and any contest date and returns that list with the statute on each row, so a contractor with nine live jobs gets nine clean sets instead of one uneasy memory.

Two of those rows have teeth beyond the date. Failure to serve the recorded lien within 15 days makes it voidable "to the extent that the failure or delay is shown to have been prejudicial," an unforced error at the end of a six month sequence. And the year under s.713.22(1) is not fixed: if the owner has the clerk serve a Notice of Contest of Lien, you have 60 days from that service to sue or the lien is extinguished automatically. That notice landing on your desk is the one moment on this page to put the file in front of a Florida construction attorney, with your dates already clean.

Serve it the way chapter 713 counts as service, and keep the proof

The form is prescribed at s.713.06(2)(c), and the statute says the notice may be in substantially that form. Substantially does not extend to the warning, which the notice carries in capitals, exactly:

WARNING! FLORIDA'S CONSTRUCTION LIEN LAW ALLOWS SOME UNPAID CONTRACTORS, SUBCONTRACTORS, AND MATERIAL SUPPLIERS TO FILE LIENS AGAINST YOUR PROPERTY EVEN IF YOU HAVE MADE PAYMENT IN FULL.

Around it goes the content that identifies the claim: your name and address, the owner's name and address, a description of the property, what you are furnishing, and who you contracted with. If you are a sub-sub or a materialman to a subcontractor, s.713.06(2)(a) adds one line: "A sub-subcontractor or a materialman to a subcontractor must serve a copy of the notice on the contractor as a prerequisite to perfecting a lien." Owner and contractor both.

Service methods are set by s.713.18. Hand delivery to the person to be served, to a partner if it is a partnership, or to an officer or director if it is a corporation. Common carrier delivery service, or registered, Global Express Guaranteed or certified mail with postage prepaid. Posting on the site of the improvement, but only where the first two cannot be accomplished.

The certified receipt, the tracking record or the signed delivery confirmation goes in the job folder next to the notice. The day this matters is the day an owner's lawyer says no notice was ever received, and a green card with a date on it ends that argument in one email.

Get the Notice of Commencement first, because it holds every address you need

You cannot serve an owner you cannot name. The instrument that names them is the Notice of Commencement, recorded by the owner under s.713.13 before work commences, required when the direct contract exceeds $5,000, with a carve-out under s.713.135 for repair or replacement of an existing HVAC system under $15,000. It is the owner's filing, and it is your address book.

It lists the owner and the owner's address, the contractor, the surety on any payment bond, and the lender, which is precisely the distribution list your notice needs. A certified copy or notarized statement is posted at the job site, and the original sits in the official records of the county the property is in: Miami-Dade, Broward, Orange, Hillsborough, Duval, wherever you are working.

Two of its own dates matter to you. It is void if work is not commenced within 90 days after recording, and it is effective for one year from recording unless it states another period, so a job that stalls and restarts can leave you copying addresses off a dead instrument.

Photograph the posted copy on your first day on site. Ten seconds, and it is the cheapest insurance in Florida construction. How to read one is in the Notice of Commencement guide.

Send the public-job version under its own name, on its own two clocks

There is no lien on public property. On a state, county, city or school board job your security is the payment bond under s.255.05, which runs on two notices that are easy to swap by mistake.

Notice to Contractor. A claimant not in privity with the contractor, laborers excepted, serves it before commencing or not later than 45 days after commencing. If the bond was not recorded in time, you get up to 45 days after being served a copy of it.

Notice of Nonpayment. Not earlier than 45 days after your first furnishing, and not later than 90 days after your final furnishing, on the statutory form and under oath.

Notice which way each 45 points. The Notice to Contractor's 45 days is a ceiling: send it late and you are out. The Notice of Nonpayment's 45 days is a floor: send it early and it does not count. A lot of published Florida summaries put the floor on the Notice to Contractor, which is exactly backwards, and following that version earns you a late Notice to Contractor and a premature Notice of Nonpayment on the same job. Bond suit is one year, compressed to 60 days if you are served with a Notice of Contest of Claim, and a Notice of Nonpayment that is fraudulent or willfully exaggerated forfeits your bond rights outright. The full public sequence is in bond claims on Florida public jobs.

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 Notice to Owner carries no state fee. It is a page and a certified mail stamp, the cheapest item on this list and the one that decides whether the rest is worth anything. The government charges around it cannot be argued down after the fact, so they earn the same calendar treatment:

The Sunbiz row connects back to this page: an administratively dissolved entity is a poor position from which to enforce anything, and $400 is a real price for a form that takes minutes. The exemption filing is in the Florida workers' comp exemption guide, and the invoice side of all this is in invoicing and getting paid in Florida.

Prepare the next one off the job you are standing on today

The habit that fixes this permanently is small. On the day you first furnish to any Florida job you did not sign directly with the owner, write that date down and get the notice in the mail inside 40 days. That is the whole discipline, and it pays better per hour than anything else you will do in the office this month.

On a Florida deal record, the job clocks panel counts the Notice to Owner deadline from that job's first furnishing date and names the section it comes from. Set the actual start date to the day you really first furnished, not the contract date, and the days remaining become real. Prepare Notice to Owner then assembles the notice from that job's own facts, your business name and address, the owner's name and address off the contact, the property address, your scope and your first furnishing date, and hands it back for review with anything still outstanding named, usually the recorded Notice of Commencement reference. You read it, you serve it, and the proof goes back on the job.

Open your oldest live Florida job, put its real first furnishing date on the deal, and read the Notice to Owner clock that appears underneath it. If that number is uncomfortable, run the rest of your jobs through the Florida lien deadline calculator this afternoon and find out how many still have a window open.

<!-- Capture later: a Florida deal record with the job clocks panel showing the Notice to Owner deadline counted from first furnishing, with the Prepare Notice to Owner button beneath it. Needs a Florida tenant; the current demo tenant is Ontario. -->