Get paid on a Florida school or county job where there is no lien to file

You are the mechanical sub on a middle school HVAC replacement for a Florida school district. The subcontract is $186,500, three draws came through for $121,000, and then the general stopped returning calls. That leaves $186,500 minus $121,000, so $65,500 outstanding on a building owned by a public body. Here is the part contractors find out in the wrong week: you cannot lien a school. Public property carries no construction lien in Florida, so the recorded Claim of Lien that would have secured that $65,500 on a private buildout does not exist on this job at all.

What does exist is a payment bond, recorded in the county public records before the first day of work, standing in for the lien and holding the money. Reaching it is a sequence rather than a letter: two notices with dates that point in opposite directions, and a suit clock that a single piece of paper from the other side can cut from a year to 60 days.

By the end of this page you will have four things: this job classified as public work with your place in the contract chain stamped on it, a Notice to Contractor served and dated inside 45 days of the day you commenced furnishing, a sworn Notice of Nonpayment held for the window that does not open until day 45 after your first furnishing and shuts 90 days after your final furnishing, and the suit date in your calendar with its 60 day trapdoor marked. Two facts drive every one of those dates, your first furnishing day and your final furnishing day, and nobody but you knows them.

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.

Classify the job as public before you count a single day

The trigger is who owns the property, not who signed your subcontract and not how the job looks from the cab of the truck. A state agency, a county, a city, a school board, a water management or other special district, a state college: if the improvement sits on their land, Fla. Stat. s.255.05 is the statute you are working under and chapter 713 is not.

That single classification changes everything downstream. On a private job your protection is the Notice to Owner served by day 45 and the Claim of Lien recorded by day 90, all of it attaching to the property. On a public job the property is untouchable and the bond is the whole of your security, on a different form, to a different recipient, on different dates. A contractor who runs a school job through the private calendar serves a carefully prepared Notice to Owner on a school board with no obligation to care, and never serves either document that would have worked.

Stamp two fields on the job the day you sign it: public or private, and whether you are in privity with the contractor. The bond notices in this guide belong to a claimant not in privity with the contractor, laborers excepted, which is the sub, the sub-sub and the supplier. If your contract is with the public entity itself, you are the contractor, the bond is yours to furnish, and these two notices are what your own subs will be serving on you.

The private-side sequence, for the jobs on your board that are not public, is in the Florida Notice to Owner guide and Florida lien deadlines, and the instrument that carries the owner and surety addresses on a private job is covered in the Notice of Commencement guide.

Get a copy of the bond before your crew rolls, because two dollar bands decide whether one exists

Not every public job is bonded, and the exemptions land precisely on the size of work a solo or small Florida contractor bids.

Read the middle two rows again, because that is the band most municipal work sits in. A $150,000 city job may be bonded or may be waived, and the answer is a public record rather than a guess.

Finding out is one request. Under s.255.05(1) the contractor executes and records the bond in the public records of the county where the improvement is located, and provides the public entity a certified copy of the recorded bond. The statute puts real weight behind that: the public entity may not make a payment to the contractor until the contractor has complied. So the bond is on file at the county, the certified copy is on file with the owner, and both are reachable by asking. Ask on the day you sign, not on the day you are owed money.

There is a date attached to this too. If the payment bond was not recorded before work commenced, or before work recommenced after a default or abandonment, s.255.05(2)(a) gives you up to 45 days after the date you are served with a copy of the bond to serve your written notice. That is a rescue clause for a job that started out of order, not a reason to go looking for the bond in month four.

Serve the Notice to Contractor inside 45 days of the day you commenced

This is the ticket in. A claimant not in privity with the contractor serves written notice on the contractor that they intend to look to the bond for protection, and the statute times it: "before commencing or not later than 45 days after commencing to furnish labor, services, or materials."

Commencing to furnish is the day your labor, services or materials first went into that job. A delivery of ductwork left on site starts it. The subcontract signing does not, the preconstruction meeting does not, and your first invoice does not. Deliver in February and send a crew in April, and February is your date.

Note what the statute puts first. Before commencing is the leading option, and a notice served the week you sign can never be late. On a public job there is no reason to hold this document at all: serve it at mobilization and the entire question is closed while your crew is still loading the truck.

Read the two 45s the right way round, because most Florida summaries print them backwards

There are two 45 day rules in s.255.05 and they point in opposite directions. This is the single most repeated error in published Florida construction content, and following the wrong version breaks both notices on the same job.

The claim you will read, on a lot of pages that otherwise look authoritative, is that the Notice to Contractor may not be served earlier than 45 days after first furnishing. That sentence is real statutory language. It is just bolted to the wrong document. The 45 day floor belongs to the Notice of Nonpayment. The Notice to Contractor has a 45 day ceiling and no floor at all.

A contractor working from the backwards version waits out 45 days before serving the Notice to Contractor, which puts it past its ceiling, then serves the Notice of Nonpayment as soon as an invoice goes unpaid, which puts it under its floor. Two documents, both prepared carefully, neither one counting. The corrected reading is at the statute itself, s.255.05(2)(a) and (2)(a)2, and it takes about a minute to confirm.

Swear the Notice of Nonpayment and serve the surety with a copy

The second notice is the claim. The statute says it is served under oath and, in its own words, "may not be served earlier than 45 days after the first furnishing of labor, services, or materials by the claimant or later than 90 days after the final furnishing."

Three things about it are easy to get wrong and all three are fatal in their own way.

It goes to two recipients. Section 255.05(2)(a) requires a claimant not in privity with the contractor to "serve a written notice of nonpayment on the contractor and a copy of the notice of nonpayment on the surety." The surety is the party actually holding the money. Serving only the general is the version of this that quietly fails.

It is sworn. The statutory form carries an oath, so it is notarized rather than merely signed, and Florida's form provides for online notarization as well as a physical notary. Build the ten minutes for that into your week rather than into the last afternoon of the window.

The number in it has to be true. A claimant who serves a fraudulent notice of nonpayment forfeits their rights under the bond. Round-ups, optimistic extras and unapproved change work padded into the amount are not aggressive negotiating on this document, they are the way a valid claim gets thrown out entirely. Bill what your ledger says, which is one more reason for the ledger to be current before you draft. Invoicing and getting paid in Florida covers keeping the balance defensible, and pricing Florida jobs covers getting the extras approved in writing before they become the disputed half of a bond claim.

Put one real job on one calendar, then guard the year that follows

Take the school job. You commenced furnishing on January 10, 2026 and you finally furnished on March 1, 2026. Those two dates are yours. Everything below falls out of them.

Look at the first two rows. On this job the two 45 day rules land on the same square of the calendar, February 24, and point away from each other: it is the last lawful day for one notice and the first lawful day for the other. That is the clearest picture of why the mix-up costs money, and it is why the two clocks are worth carrying separately rather than as one remembered number.

The last row is the one that ends claims. The contractor or the public entity can have a Notice of Contest of Claim served on you, and from the date of service, in the statute's words, "the time within which you may file suit to enforce your claim is limited to 60 days after the date of service." A year becomes two months, on somebody else's initiative, delivered to your mailbox. The day one of those arrives is the day the file goes in front of a Florida construction attorney with your dates already clean and your proofs of service already in the folder.

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 two bond notices carry no state fee. They are pages, certified postage and one notary appointment for the sworn one, which makes them the cheapest items in this entire sequence and the two that decide whether the other $65,500 is collectible. The government charges around them cannot be argued down after the fact, so they earn the same calendar treatment:

The first row matters to this page directly. Public bodies verify that the entity they are paying is active, and an administratively dissolved company is a poor position from which to press a surety for $65,500. The exemption filing is walked through in the Florida workers' comp exemption guide.

Set both clocks on a job you are standing on today

Mark a Florida deal as public work and stamp your role in the contract chain on it, and the job clocks panel swaps the chapter 713 lien dates for the two s.255.05 bond obligations, each carrying the statute it comes from. The Notice to Contractor shows as a single due date counted 45 days from the day you commenced furnishing. The Notice of Nonpayment shows the way the statute actually writes it, as a window with an opening date and a closing date rather than one deadline, because a notice served before the window opens is as worthless as one served after it shuts. Until those two classifying facts are on the job, the panel names exactly which ones it is waiting for instead of quietly computing the wrong calendar.

Set the first furnishing date to the day you genuinely first furnished, not the contract date, and the counts underneath become numbers you can act on this week.

Open your oldest live public job, set its class and your role, and read the two dates that appear underneath. Then run every private job on your board through the Florida lien deadline calculator and see which windows are still open. If your board is thin after that, this week's Miami-Dade and Orlando permit records name contractors of record you can call by name on jobs that are already funded.

<!-- Capture later: a Florida deal record classified as public work, with the job clocks panel showing the Notice to Contractor due date and the Notice of Nonpayment window with separate opens and closes dates. Needs a Florida tenant; the current demo tenant is Ontario. -->