The bond behind your Texas public job pays faster than a lien does

You picked up a package on a middle school, or a fire station, or a county paving contract. Somewhere in the pre-construction meeting somebody says there is no lien on public property in Texas, and it lands like a job handed to you with the collection tool taken off it.

The opposite happened. Public property could not carry a mechanic's lien, so Texas put something better in its place: a payment bond, written by a corporate surety, in the full amount of the prime contract, posted before the prime was allowed to start work.

That bond exists on your job right now. Under Government Code s.2253.021(c) it sits there solely for payment bond beneficiaries, and it reaches you if your contract is with the prime or with one of the prime's subcontractors. A lien is a cloud on somebody's title that you then have to foreclose. A bond is a claims department with reserves behind it and a prime contractor who signed an indemnity to get it issued.

Here is the part worth the whole page. Reaching that bond runs on the fifteenth of the month, the same habit that protects your lien rights on private work. If you already send the monthly notice on private jobs, you are already running the routine that protects the public ones.

The bond went up before you did

Chapter 2253 of the Government Code is the McGregor Act, and it tells a governmental entity what to require from its prime contractor before any work begins. "Governmental entity" is wide by design: s.2253.001 reaches the state, a county, a municipality, a school district, and the departments and agencies of each.

Two bonds, two beneficiaries, and mixing them up costs a claim. The performance bond under s.2253.021(b) protects the entity: the district's assurance that the building gets built to the plans. The payment bond under s.2253.021(c) protects you, and it is written in the amount of the whole prime contract rather than your subcontract. On a $9 million campus your claim sits behind $9 million of surety paper.

Under s.2253.021(f) the bond or an attachment to it must display the surety's name, addresses and telephone number for notices of claim, or else the Texas Department of Insurance toll-free number and a statement that the claims address can be had by calling it. That number is 800-252-3439, weekdays 8 to 5 Central, and it is your fallback when a prime is slow with the bond copy.

If the entity failed to obtain a payment bond it was required to obtain, s.2253.027 puts it in the surety's shoes, and beneficiaries get a lien on money due the prime as if Subchapter J, Chapter 53 of the Property Code applied. Missing paper on the buyer's side moves your claim onto a body with a tax base, and you notice that entity as though it were the surety.

Ask for the bond copy in week one, and two statutes make them hand it over

Asking for the bond feels like an accusation the first time. It is not: the legislature wrote the request into the statute twice, with a deadline on it, and public-work project managers field it constantly.

Ask the prime. Under s.2253.024, on written request from a person who provides public work labor or material, the prime must provide the name and last known address of the governmental entity it contracted with, a copy of the payment and performance bonds, and the surety's name plus that toll-free number. It is due within a reasonable time and not later than the 10th day after the request lands. With no direct contract between you, the prime may charge actual cost up to $25. A prime that ignores the request is liable for the reasonable and necessary costs you incur getting the information anyway.

Ask the entity. Under s.2253.026 the governmental entity furnishes a certified copy of the payment bond, any attachment to it, and the public work contract the bond was given for, to anyone who applies and swears an affidavit that they supplied unpaid labor or material, contracted for unpaid specially fabricated material, or are being sued on the bond, for a reasonable fee covering the actual cost of the copies. That certified copy is prima facie evidence of the content, execution and delivery of the original, so the version the district hands you is the version you can put in front of a court.

Four facts go in the job file in the week you sign: the bond number, the surety's legal name, its claims address, and the prime's exact legal name as it appears on the bond. You need them on the day you are already annoyed, and hunting then is how a 15th gets missed.

Federal work has the same door: under 40 U.S.C. 3133(a) the contracting agency furnishes a certified copy of the bond and the contract to anyone who submits an affidavit that they supplied labor or material and were not paid.

Same fifteenth, one more envelope

This is the good news the rest of the page hangs on. The private-work habit is a page mailed by the 15th of the third month after each month you furnished. Section 2253.041 asks for the same count on public work, and adds the surety to the address line.

Read the second row against the first and the routine gets simpler, not harder. A second-tier sub sends two letters on the same 15th, covering two different months of work: on 15 June, April's letter to the prime under s.2253.047(c) and March's claim to the prime and the surety under s.2253.041. One envelope run, two months of your labor secured.

Both go certified or registered under s.2253.048: to the prime at its residence or last known business address, and to the surety at the address on the bond, the one on file with the Texas Department of Insurance, or any other address allowed by law. That is the second reason to pull the bond copy early.

The s.2253.047(b) retainage notice is the odd one, due after your first month on site rather than your last, so it belongs in your first submittal package.

Count the fifteenths off one real job

You are a mechanical sub on a school district job. Your subcontract is with a sub of the prime, so you are second tier, and your agreement provides for retainage. First day on site is 9 March 2026. You furnish through August. The public work contract reaches final completion on 20 November 2026.

Two rows catch people out. The 15 August row is not a typo: sixty-one days after you mail a notice, an unpaid claim is suable. Your March work reaches that point in the middle of August, while the job is still running and the prime still wants a clean punch list out of you.

The 15 June 2027 row surprises people, because the suit clock under s.2253.078(b) runs from the date each notice was mailed rather than from the end of the job. Each month you notice starts its own year, and the earliest one closes first.

Those are month-bucket counts, the same arithmetic that governs your private lien dates, so feed the job into the Texas lien deadline calculator rather than counting fifteenths on a wall calendar at five on a Friday.

The tenth they are holding, on a public job

Retainage on public work has a statutory cap and a flow-down rule, both money on your application before anybody claims anything.

Government Code s.2252.032(b) caps the rate: 10 percent on a contract worth less than $5 million, 5 percent at $5 million or more, and 10 percent for the construction or maintenance of a dam whatever the value. Under s.2252.032(d) a prime may not withhold a greater percentage from you than the entity may withhold from the prime, so a subcontract offering 10 percent on a job where the entity is capped at 5 is over-withholding from your first pay application. Under s.2252.032(e) the entity may not withhold retainage after the work under the contract is complete, including through the warranty period.

Two kinds of contract sit outside that subchapter, which puts the cap back in your own paper: one whose total price estimate at execution is under $400,000, and a TxDOT contract let under Chapter 223 of the Transportation Code, s.2252.033(2) and (3). There, the number is the one you negotiate at award.

The claim side has its own ceiling. Under s.2253.076(c) a retainage claim is not valid for an amount greater than 10 percent of the contract it arises under, and the sworn statement you send with a s.2253.041 notice states separately the retainage that has not yet become due. That is the statute keeping the two piles apart, the same way the ten percent on a private job sits in two piles with two clocks.

Sue on day 61, and put the lawyer on their bill

Section 2253.073 is short enough to read twice. A payment bond beneficiary who provided labor or material may sue the principal or the surety, jointly or severally, on the bond if the claim is not paid before the 61st day after the notice was mailed, for the unpaid balance and reasonable attorney fees. Section 2253.074 lets a court award costs and reasonable attorney fees that are equitable in a proceeding to enforce a bond claim, and s.2253.077 puts the suit in a county holding any part of the public work.

Most claims stop short of that. Your letter lands in a claims department, gets a number and an examiner, and the examiner asks you for backup. Under s.2253.025 you have 30 days from a written request by the prime or the surety to hand over the agreement or purchase order, any statement or payment request showing the amount claimed and the work performed, and, if asked, the estimated amount due for each month you furnished. Answer inside the 30 days with the documents you already attached and the claim keeps moving.

Then the commercial pressure does the rest, and it points at the prime rather than at you. A prime signs a general indemnity agreement with its surety to get bonded at all, so a dollar the surety pays on your claim is a dollar it collects back from the prime, and an open claim sits in the file the surety reads when the prime asks for the bond on its next school. With clean backup and no scope dispute underneath, that usually settles through the prime well inside the 61 days. Where a real dispute sits underneath, s.2253.073 still gives you a date to stop waiting on, and the moves from there are the ones in what to do when a Texas client will not pay.

A private lien claim ends in a foreclosure suit against real property, with a lender and a title insurer in the room. A bond claim ends against a party whose business is paying claims, on a two-month fuse, with your legal costs recoverable.

What the claim letter says, and where it lands

The heart of the letter is a sworn statement of account. Section 2253.041 asks it to certify that the amount claimed is just and correct, that all just and lawful offsets, payments and credits known to you have been allowed, and to state any retainage applicable to the account that has not become due. Sworn means signed in front of a notary. It is the notary stamp that turns your invoice into an instrument.

What you attach depends on how the work was bought.

All of that is already in your job file: delivery tickets, signed daily reports, pay applications, purchase orders, the executed subcontract. The letter is a cover page over paper you generated while you were working, so keep the file tidy while the crew is on site rather than rebuilding it in month four.

Then it goes out certified or registered to the prime and the surety, and you keep the green cards and the tracking, because the mailing date is the date both clocks count from: the 61 days to suit and the year to file it.

A federal job runs on the same idea and a different calendar

Bid for the Corps of Engineers, the VA, a military installation or a federal courthouse and you leave the McGregor Act for the Miller Act at 40 U.S.C. 3131 to 3133. The instinct transfers. The dates do not.

The row that catches Texas contractors is the notice deadline. Federal work counts 90 days from your last day of furnishing, one deadline for the whole job rather than a monthly bucket, and the year to sue runs off that same last day. Carry the Texas habit onto a federal job, mail on the 15th of the third month, and a March finish is already late. Run both federal clocks off your demobilization date.

Charge the entity interest when the payment runs late

While the bond machinery sits behind you, a second statute runs in front of it, and it is not the private-job clock.

Chapter 2251 of the Government Code governs payment by a governmental entity. Under s.2251.021 a payment is overdue on the 31st day after the later of the date the entity received the goods, the date the service was completed, or the date it received an invoice, and on the 46th day where the political subdivision's governing body meets monthly or less often. Under s.2251.022 a vendor paid by the entity pays the subcontractor its share by the 10th day after receiving it, and the share is overdue on the 11th.

Under s.2251.025 an overdue amount accrues interest at one percent plus the prime rate the Wall Street Journal published on the first day of July in the preceding fiscal year that was not a Saturday or Sunday, fixed on 1 September and held for that fiscal year. For Texas fiscal 2026, the year running 1 September 2025 through 31 August 2026, the Comptroller sets that rate at 8.5 percent. Interest stops when the payment is mailed or transmitted, so a $100,000 progress payment that goes overdue on 1 March 2026 and is paid on 30 April carries about $1,400 of interest.

That is a different set of numbers from the 35 days and 1.5 percent a month that Chapter 28 of the Property Code puts on private jobs, so run the right one for the job you are on. Getting paid in 35 days in Texas sets out the private clock beside it.

Put the bond number in the file before you put a crew on the job

The whole page reduces to four moves, and three of them happen before anything goes wrong.

Ask the prime in writing for the bond copy the week you sign, and hold the bond number, the surety's legal name and claims address, and the prime's exact legal name in the job file. If you are second tier with retainage in your agreement, mail the s.2253.047(b) notice by the 15th of the second month after you start. Then work the same 15th every month you are unpaid: sworn statement attached, certified mail, prime and surety. And if it goes past 61 days from a mailing, you have a suit available with fees recoverable, against a party whose business is paying claims.

Two links to take with you. Where Texas public work actually posts maps the ESBD, the TxDOT lettings, the districts and the cities, and covers what bonding and HUB do to your ability to bid in the first place. The Texas lien deadline calculator turns your furnishing months into the fifteenths you owe.

There is no monthly subscription on AEC Stack. The platform fee is 2.5% of each invoice processed through the platform, taken on the payment due date, so the software gets paid after you do.

Then go and find the next bonded job: find work is the feed of Texas public and private projects with a buyer, a date and somebody to call on them.