Texas lets you start framing this month, so build the crew the builder calls first

Texas does not license framers or carpenters. There is no state exam, no board, no application and nothing to wait for. If you can frame, you can be a framing subcontractor in Texas as soon as you have a truck, a crew and a certificate of insurance.

That is the single best thing about starting a trade business in this state. It also tells you what you are competing on, and it is not paper. A builder in Frisco has a plan, a slab pouring Thursday, and a framer who did not show up last time. The crew that answers the phone, arrives with the crew size it promised and hands back a frame that passes inspection the first time gets the next section.

Texas residential volume is enormous and it repeats. A builder who finds a framing sub that scales with him stops shopping. Here is the route from framing for a general contractor to being that sub: what actually gates you, how the bid is built here, which contract shape protects your margin when lumber moves, and how to get the money out on schedule.

Four things get you on the job, and not one of them is a state exam

City registration, and only when you are the one at the permit counter. Texas cities register whoever pulls the permit and calls the inspection. On tract housing and most custom work the builder pulls the permit, the frame inspection is called on it, and the city has no reason to learn your name. That changes the day you contract straight with a homeowner for an addition, a garage conversion or a patio cover, because then you are standing at the counter yourself.

Which city applies is decided by where the permit is pulled, not where your yard is. The full picture of which trades Texas gates and which it leaves alone is do you need a contractor license in Texas.

General liability. The state leaves the limit to you, so the builder's insurer sets it instead, and it does that before your truck comes through the gate: commercial general liability with the builder named as additional insured, a waiver of subrogation and a W-9. A useful target is the limit Texas already imposes on the trades it does license. Under 16 TAC 73.40(a) a Texas Electrical Contractor carries $300,000 per occurrence for combined bodily injury and property damage, $600,000 aggregate and $300,000 aggregate for products and completed operations. A framing sub who shows up with that reads as a business rather than a crew.

The workers comp decision. Yours to make, and the next section is the math.

Crew. The real gate. A builder is buying a rate of houses per week, and the sub who can name that rate honestly wins scheduling conversations against subs who cannot.

Texas lets you choose on workers comp, and the math is worth doing on paper

Texas is the only state that lets a private employer decline workers compensation coverage. That election is called non-subscriber status, and framing is exactly the trade where the numbers get interesting, because framing payroll is most of your cost and carpentry sits at the expensive end of the comp rate table.

What the premium buys is the exclusive remedy. An injured employee's claim runs through the comp system instead of through a jury. Drop coverage and Labor Code s.406.033 strips the three defenses an employer would otherwise raise in a negligence suit: contributory negligence, assumption of the risk, and the fellow-servant rule. That is the trade, stated plainly. Premium against exposure, with your fall protection program sitting in the middle of it.

If you go non-subscriber, the filing is light. DWC Form-005 goes to the Division of Workers' Compensation each year between 1 February and 30 April, within 30 days of hiring your first employee, within 10 days of dropping a policy, and within 10 days of a DWC request. The no-coverage notice goes on the wall in English and Spanish.

Make the decision on purpose, and make it before you price the work, because a builder can require coverage in the subcontract whatever the state permits. Read that clause before the number goes in. The full comparison, including the occupational accident policies non-subscribers buy instead, is workers comp is optional in Texas.

How a Texas framing bid is actually built

Framing is quoted per square foot of framed area, and the first thing to settle is which square feet. Heated area is one number. Framed area, which picks up the garage, the covered porches and the patio cover, is a bigger one. Say in the bid which one you measured and at what rate each part is counted.

Then say what moves it. Plate height above nine feet, roof pitch above eight in twelve, a cut roof instead of set trusses, steel or engineered beams, a stair run, a second floor, brick ledges and long spans all change the labor and none of them show in a square footage total.

The spread between two bids on the same plan is rarely the rate. It is what sits inside the number. So publish it.

That table is not paperwork. It is the sentence you read back in month three when a superintendent says he thought the cornice was in the price.

Labor only or labor and material, and which one protects your margin

Labor-only framing means the builder buys the lumber package, has it delivered, and you supply crew, tools and consumables. The invoice is smaller and the margin percentage is usually better, because you carry no lumber price risk, no shorts, no float and no line of credit. On tract work the builder's yard credit buys better than yours anyway. Protect the one exposure it leaves you: write that framing starts on a complete package on the ground, and that standby caused by a short or wrong delivery is billed at a stated day rate.

Labor and material triples the invoice and hands you the material risk. You buy the package, you own the shorts, and you carry the cost until the draw arrives, which the Texas payment clock below puts at more than a month even when the builder pays on time. The margin dollars can be larger, and custom builders and remodelers pay a real premium for one number and one throat to choke.

The honest split: while you are growing from one house at a time to three or four, labor only is the shape that survives a bad lumber run. Turnkey earns its place when you buy well, hold working capital, and can get an escalation clause signed. Which brings us to the clause.

The lumber clause a builder will actually sign

An escalation clause gets initialed when it carries a baseline, an expiry and a switch the builder can flip. Write those in and it stops being the paragraph he strikes out.

1. Name the basis. The price is built on the material list priced by a named supplier on a named date, with that quote attached to the bid. The clause with no baseline is the one that gets struck out.
2. Put a window on it. The price holds for fourteen or thirty days from bid date to material release. Short windows get signed because they expire before the builder's own risk does.
3. Make it symmetrical. If the delivered cost of the priced package moves more than five percent up or down between the baseline date and release, the contract price adjusts by the documented difference on the affected items. A clause that can lower his cost stops reading like a one-way ratchet.
4. Attach the proof. The adjustment is supported by the dated supplier invoice, filed with the pay application. Documented adjustments get paid, asserted ones get argued about.
5. Give him a way out. He may release the package at the original price on the original date, or cap the adjustment at an agreed figure. Handing the builder a switch that kills the risk is the part that gets the clause signed rather than negotiated.

The clause dies the moment the lumber is on the ground, so the fastest version of all of this is simply a short quote validity and an early material release date written into the bid.

The draw schedule that stops you financing the builder

Plenty of production framing runs on one payment after the frame passes inspection, which means you carry every hour of payroll for the whole frame. Ask for three draws instead, tied to events a superintendent can see from the road: floor system complete, walls up and roof set, then frame complete at inspection pass with the balance released.

Texas law behind that request is unusually strong, and it runs in your favor.

Thirty-five days, then interest. On a private job an owner has until day 35 from a written payment request to pay a contractor. When a contractor or a sub receives a payment covering lower-tier work, the lower tier's share goes out within 7 days. Overdue amounts accrue 1.5 percent a month under Tex. Prop. Code s.28.004, there is a statutory right to suspend work after notice, and the terms are non-waivable.

Ten percent the owner is already holding. Under Tex. Prop. Code s.53.101 the owner retains 10 percent of the contract value during the work and for 30 days after completion, and that fund exists for claimants like you.

A monthly notice that makes the owner hold money for you. Under Tex. Prop. Code s.53.056 a sub sends one notice to the owner and the original contractor together, carrying statutory warning language. On receipt, s.53.081 lets the owner withhold enough to cover your claim, on top of the retainage he is already reserving. Demand payment out of those trapped funds and s.53.083 gives the original contractor 30 days to dispute it. If he does not, he is treated as having agreed and the owner is directed to pay you from what he withheld. Sent on time, one page a month converts a slow builder into an owner sitting on your money on purpose.

Five dates carry the whole mechanism, and they are month buckets rather than day counts, so everything you furnished in March shares one deadline.

The one-year residential and two-year commercial split you will still hear quoted around a job trailer went out with HB 2237. It is one year on every project type now, which makes the calendar simpler and the reminder more important. The dates for each month you worked are counted for you by the Texas lien deadline calculator, and the mechanics of the retainage claim, in order, are the ten percent Texas already holds for you.

The homestead page you sign before the first stud

Contracting straight with a homeowner is where the margin is, and Texas hands you one page that protects it. On a homestead, the house the owner actually lives in, the lien rights come from a written contract executed before any labor or material is furnished, signed by both spouses if the owner is married, and filed with the county clerk in the county where the homestead sits. Sign it at the kitchen table before the crew rolls and the whole machinery in the table above is available to you on that job. The affidavit you might eventually file carries one formatting rule of its own: the conspicuous 10-point boldface line reading THIS IS NOT A LIEN. THIS IS ONLY AN AFFIDAVIT CLAIMING A LIEN.

Direct-to-homeowner work comes with a second thing worth having. If a homeowner ever sends a construction defect notice, the Residential Construction Liability Act gives you a right to cure and a clock to do it on: inspect within 35 days, with up to three inspections, put a written settlement offer in the owner's hands by the 60th day after the notice, and finish the repairs by the 60th day after the offer is accepted in writing. Answer on those dates and the Act's damage caps and defenses stay yours. Framers who work only for builders rarely see one of these letters. Framers who build patio covers and garage conversions do, and the ones who inspect quickly usually end the matter with a Saturday and a nail gun.

The punch walk, and the backcharge that lands on the right trade

Frame complete is where somebody else starts working inside your frame. A plumber drills a bottom plate, a mechanical crew cuts a joist, an electrician notches a stud, and the engineer's letter or the failed inspection lands on the framer.

Three habits close that gap. Walk the frame with the superintendent the day you finish and email him the agreed list that afternoon, because a dated list you have both read is what ends the argument. Photograph the frame before you demobilize, plates, joists, headers and hardware, since dated photos are the cheapest insurance in framing. And price the return trip in the bid, one visit included and the rest at a stated day rate, so a builder knows what it costs to send you back and charges the trade that caused it.

When a backcharge does appear on a pay application, ask in writing for the invoice, the photograph and the date. A deduction taken without a conversation first is still a conversation, and one that cannot produce those three things tends to disappear.

Becoming the sub who gets called first

Price gets you one house. These get you the schedule.

Quote capacity in houses, not in men. "Two starts a week, three if I have two weeks' notice" is the sentence a scheduler needs. It gets you into the schedule ahead of a cheaper crew who cannot answer the question.

Give them one phone number that answers. Site problems on a frame are hourly problems. The sub who picks up at 6:40 in the morning is worth more than the sub who is a few cents a foot cheaper.

Turn the bid around in forty-eight hours, inclusions table attached. Fast and explicit beats slow and vague, and the table is what stops the scope arguments that lose you the next job.

Keep the paperwork pack sitting ready. Certificate of insurance with the builder as additional insured, waiver of subrogation, W-9, and a one-line answer on comp or non-subscriber status. Being fast on that pack is itself a signal about how you will run the frame. How to get in front of the right person in the first place is get on GC bid lists in Texas.

Keep the entity in good standing, because a builder's compliance check looks. A Texas LLC files its franchise report by 15 May each year. Under the no-tax-due threshold, which is $2,650,000 for report years 2026 and 2027, you owe nothing and the Public Information Report is still due. Filing it takes minutes and holds your right to transact business, which is the box a builder's vendor onboarding is actually ticking.

Ask for the next plan set before the current house tops out. Builders schedule framers weeks ahead. The crew that asks early is in the plan, and the crew that waits for a call is the backup.

What this costs on AEC Stack

There is no monthly subscription. The platform fee is 2.5 percent of each invoice processed through AEC Stack, collected on the payment due date, so the bids, the inclusions, the draw schedule and the notice dates cost you nothing until money moves.

Pick the builder whose subdivision you drive past every morning and find out who schedules their framing. Find work shows you where the next Texas starts are being permitted, which is the list that conversation should begin from.