Get paid in 35 days, or put your tools down on day 46

You sent the pay application three weeks ago. The portal still says under review. The person who can release it has not returned two calls, and on Monday you are supposed to load the truck for another week on a job that has not paid for the last one.

In Texas that silence sits on a clock, and the clock belongs to the person holding your money. Chapter 28 of the Property Code gives a private owner 35 days from the day they receive your written payment request. Past that, the unpaid amount carries interest at 1.5 percent a month, and a contract term that tries to waive it is void.

Then there is the second lever, the one you can pull yourself without filing anything. Send one letter, wait ten days, and you may suspend work without breaching the contract, stay off site until you are paid, and bill them for demobilizing and coming back.

This is what each period does, the letter that unlocks the stop-work right, and the arithmetic that turns a chased invoice into a priced position.

The clocks, and whose problem each one is

Private jobs, Chapter 28 of the Texas Property Code:

Read the first two rows together, because that is the subcontractor's real timeline. The owner has 35 days to pay the general contractor. The general contractor then has 7 days to pass your share down. Your money is due on day 42 counted from the day the owner received that pay application, not on whatever day the GC decides his own cash has settled.

Day 36, when their money starts costing them

Interest under Tex. Prop. Code s.28.004 begins to accrue on the day after the date payment becomes due, at 1.5 percent each month, which is 18 percent a year. It stops on the date of delivery, or on the date of mailing if payment lands within three days, or on the date judgment is entered.

Put a real draw through it. An unpaid $84,000 progress payment held 90 days past due has added $3,780 to itself, and $7,560 at six months. That is not a late fee you invented and hope they honor, it is a statutory amount you compute and invoice.

The waiver rule is what makes it stick. Under s.28.006(a), an attempted waiver of a provision of Chapter 28 is void, with one exception in s.28.006(b): a written owner-to-contractor contract for improving a single-family residence may name a later payment date, as long as that date falls before the 61st day after the request, and 1.5 percent still runs on what is unpaid. So a pay-when-paid clause, a 90 day term buried in a subcontract, a line saying no interest shall accrue: those provisions do not survive s.28.006(a).

And s.28.005 lets a person bring an action to enforce a right under the chapter, where the court may award costs and reasonable attorney's fees. That changes the shape of a $20,000 argument, because the cost of making you sue is now partly theirs.

The one page letter that lets you walk off and keep the contract

This is the part worth learning by heart.

Under Tex. Prop. Code s.28.009(a), a contractor or subcontractor who has not been paid may suspend performance on the 10th day after giving the owner, and the owner's lender, written notice that payment has not been received and stating the intent to suspend performance for nonpayment. The lender copy is required where the conditions in s.28.009(b) are met, among them that the owner obtained a construction loan secured by a recorded deed of trust and that a sign naming the lender is posted at the project site. If there is a lender sign at the gate, copy the lender.

So the notice is short. Four things: the job, the amount unpaid and the date it became due, that payment has not been received, and that you intend to suspend performance for nonpayment. Date it, send it, diary the 10th day.

Now look at what the suspension buys, in s.28.009(c). A contractor or subcontractor who suspends is not required to supply further labor, services or materials until paid the amount provided by the chapter plus costs for demobilization and remobilization. Read that twice. Pulling your crew, your scaffold and your lift off a job and bringing them back is a real invoice, and the statute says the money to restart is part of what you are owed before you restart.

Then s.28.009(c)(2): you are not responsible for damages resulting from suspending work unless, before you suspended, you were notified in writing that payment has been made or that a good faith dispute for payment exists. That is why the ten day gap exists. It is their window to either pay or put their objection in writing, and if they use neither, the delay is on their side of the ledger.

If they do send a dispute notice, s.28.009(d) sets the bar for it. The notice must include a list of specific reasons for nonpayment. Where a listed reason is subcontractor work that does not comply with the contract, that subcontractor is entitled to a reasonable opportunity to cure the listed items, or to offer a reasonable amount to compensate for items that cannot be promptly cured. A vague objection about quality does not meet that standard, and a specific one hands you a punch list you can close out and get paid on.

Match the lever to the job. Section 28.009 is written for commercial and larger multifamily work, and that is where a stop-work notice earns its keep. On a detached single-family residence, duplex, triplex or quadruplex, s.28.009(e) hands you the other lever instead: the 35 days and the 1.5 percent still run, and Chapter 53 puts your claim on the title, which on a custom home is the sharper of the two anyway because the owner is the one who has to clear it. On work for a governmental entity the clock is Chapter 2251 of the Government Code, which gets its own table below.

A dispute over $6,000 does not buy them the other $78,000

One sentence in Chapter 28 settles this argument, and it is about size rather than about who is right.

Under Tex. Prop. Code s.28.003, where a good faith dispute exists over the amount owed, the payer may withhold not more than 110 percent of the difference between what you claim is due and what they claim is due on a single-family, duplex, triplex or quadruplex original contract, and not more than 100 percent of that difference on everything else. A good faith dispute includes a dispute about whether the work was performed in a proper manner.

Work the numbers on an $84,000 commercial draw where they say $6,000 of tile was set wrong:

The $78,000 is not in dispute. It was due on day 35 with the rest of it, and from day 36 it is accruing 1.5 percent a month. A general objection to your invoice does not convert an undisputed balance into a disputed one, and the arithmetic above is the whole argument in one line of an email.

One other clause worth knowing when the owner has financing. Under s.28.008, where the owner obtained a loan for the work, properly requested a disbursement, and the lender failed to disburse within 35 days despite being obligated to, the owner's due date moves from the 35th day after your request to the 5th day after they receive the loan proceeds. So when an owner says the bank is slow, ask one question in writing: on what date did you submit the draw request to the lender? Either the answer starts a five day clock you can count, or there is no draw request and their 35 days ran out on schedule.

The seven days that are yours to run

Once the money lands with you, s.28.002(b) and (c) give you seven days to pay the tier below for the work that payment covered. That period is short on purpose, and it does more for you than it costs you.

Construction payments in Texas are trust funds under Chapter 162 of the Property Code, so running the seven days cleanly keeps the money passing through your account unambiguous. It also buys a reputation for nothing, since the money was going out anyway and only the date changed. A framer who has been paid on day 5 twice in a row answers your phone in February, when three other GCs are calling the same crew.

There is a second thing the seven days does for you, and it points back up the chain. The day the owner's money lands is the day your own clock started and the day the owner's stopped, so it is the one date in the sequence you can prove without asking anyone. Log it. On the next job, when a GC tells you his own draw only cleared last week, you are comparing his account of the calendar against a date you wrote down.

Public jobs run on a different calendar

Government work is not Chapter 28. It is Chapter 2251 of the Texas Government Code, and it counts from different events.

Two things fall out of that table. If your work splits between private and public jobs, one invoice date gives you two calendars: 35 days to pay you and 7 days to pass down on the private side, 30 days and 10 days on the public one. And before you count to 31 on a municipal or district job, find out how often that governing body sits. A council or board that meets monthly or less often is on the 46 day version, which is the difference between an interest claim you can defend and a demand letter sent two weeks early.

The interest is the easy part to skip on public work, because prime plus one is a smaller number than 18 percent a year and it looks like it is not worth the line. Bill it anyway. It is computed off a published rate rather than argued over, it goes on the same invoice as the money they already owe, and it puts the lateness into the entity's own accounts payable record instead of leaving it as something you remember and they do not.

Chapter 28 gets you paid. Chapter 53 makes sure you can.

These two run side by side and they do different jobs. Work one without the other and you end up with a lien over a figure that was only ever a guess, or an interest claim against an owner who paid the money out to somebody else months ago.

Chapter 28 makes it expensive to sit on your invoice. Chapter 53 attaches your claim to the property itself, which is a problem the owner has to clear before they sell, refinance or close the job out, and it makes them hold money back for you while they decide. If you are a sub or supplier, that machinery starts with the monthly notice: the 15th day of the third month after the month you furnished labor or materials on a commercial job, the second month on residential, served on the owner and the original contractor with the statutory warning wording, under Tex. Prop. Code s.53.056. That notice is what trapping funds under s.53.081 runs on, and it sits alongside the 10 percent statutory retainage the owner is required to hold under s.53.101.

So the practical answer to a quiet invoice is both at once. Keep the monthly notices going out on the 15th so your security stays intact, and run the Chapter 28 clocks so the money has a price on it while you wait.

The sequence, from the day the invoice goes in

Date-stamp receipt, not sending. The 35 days runs from the day the owner receives the written payment request. Email with a read receipt, a portal timestamp, or a signed transmittal makes day 35 a fact rather than an argument.

On day 36, invoice the interest. A separate line, at 1.5 percent per month, citing s.28.004. Small amounts are worth billing because billing them proves you count.

On day 36, send the suspension notice. The job, the unpaid amount, the date it came due, no payment received, intent to suspend for nonpayment. Copy the lender if there is a sign at the gate naming one.

On day 46, decide. If nothing has come back in writing, the suspension right is live, and so is your claim for demobilization and remobilization. Deciding not to use it after the notice went out is a negotiating position. Not having sent the notice is not.

Keep the lien clock running the whole time. The Chapter 28 remedies and the Chapter 53 deadlines do not wait for each other.

Count your own dates before Monday. Put the furnishing month and the invoice date into the Texas lien deadline calculator and it will give you the 15th-of-the-month deadlines and where you stand on them.

Then work the two pieces that follow this one: the monthly notice that keeps your lien rights alive, and what to do when a client will not pay. If the money you are chasing is retainage rather than a progress draw, the rules and the timing are different, and they are in claiming the 10 percent that is already yours.

Getting the front end right is what makes all of this shorter. Invoicing so the 35 days actually starts is where that begins.