The ten percent is already yours. Here is how you go and get it.

You closed out your scope in September. You invoiced it, you got paid on everything except the ten percent, and when you ask about that the answer is that retainage comes at the end of the job. The end of the job runs on somebody else's schedule, and it might be eight months out.

Texas already thought about this. Under Tex. Prop. Code s.53.101, the owner of a private job has to reserve ten percent and keep reserving it, through the work and for thirty days after the work under the original contract is completed. That is not the general contractor's working capital. It is a fund the statute holds open for the people who actually did the work, and if your paperwork is in, you can reach it.

Here is the part that costs people money. There are two piles, not one. There is the fund the owner is required by statute to reserve, and there is the retainage written into your own contract. Two piles, two notices, two clocks. Sending the paper for one does not claim the other, and the one that gets dropped is usually the second.

This page keeps them apart and hands you the dates.

Two piles of money, not one

The statutory fund exists because the Property Code says it exists. It does not depend on anyone agreeing to it or asking for it. On a private job with lienable work, the owner reserves ten percent of the contract price, or ten percent of the value of the work measured by how much of it is done, and holds that through the job plus thirty days past completion of the work under the original contract. That is s.53.101, and "owner" in that section includes the owner's agent, trustee or receiver.

Contractual retainage is different. It is the ten percent your own written agreement lets the party above you hold: the GC holding yours, or you holding your sub's. It comes from paper, not from statute, and Chapter 53 gives it its own claiming route under s.53.056 and s.53.057.

The confusion is understandable, because on a typical job the two numbers are the same ten percent and they sit in the same bank account. Legally they are separate claims with separate triggers. A claimant who sent perfect monthly notices and skipped the retainage notice has one of the two. So does a claimant who sent the retainage notice and let the monthly notices slide.

The pile the owner has to reserve

You reach the reserved fund with the notices Chapter 53 already asks for, plus an affidavit. By default that affidavit runs on a short clock, and the section after this one is about how you lengthen it.

The notices are the monthly ones under s.53.056. If you are a sub or a supplier on a commercial job, that is the fifteenth day of the third month after each month you furnished labour or materials, sent to the owner and to the original contractor, carrying the statutory warning language word for word. On residential it compresses to the second month. The mechanics of that calendar, including why one month of work can produce a notice you owe while another does not, are in the monthly notice guide.

Then s.53.103. You get a lien on the reserved funds if you sent the notices this chapter requires in the time and manner required, and you file an affidavit claiming a lien not later than the thirtieth day after the earliest of three things: the work is completed, the original contract is terminated, or the original contractor abandons performance.

Read that clock again, because it runs from the original contract, not from your scope. You can be four months clear of the site and still be inside somebody else's thirty days, or outside it. Thirty days after the original contract completes will often land well before the fifteenth-of-the-fourth-month date you were counting to under s.53.052.

Now read the four words that open s.53.103(2): "except as allowed by Section 53.057(f)". Thirty days is the default route to the reserved fund. It is not the only route, and the thing that opens the other one is the retainage notice in the next section.

The pile that only exists in your contract

If your agreement with the original contractor or with a subcontractor provides for retainage, s.53.057 gives you a notice built for exactly that money.

You send a notice of claim for unpaid retainage to the owner or reputed owner and to the original contractor, not later than the earlier of:

• the thirtieth day after the date your contract is completed, terminated or abandoned, or
• the thirtieth day after the date the original contract is terminated or abandoned.

The notice has to substantially include the date, the project description or address, your name, the type of labour or materials you provided, the original contractor's name, the party you contracted with if that is somebody different, the total unpaid retainage, and a contact person and address. You can attach invoices or billing statements to it. It is a one-page document and it goes out while you still have the file open.

The notice by itself is not the claim, and this is where it earns its keep. Under s.53.057(f) you get a lien on the reserved funds by giving that notice and then either complying with the reserved-funds subchapter or filing a lien affidavit by the s.53.052 deadline that applies to retainage, followed by a copy of the filed affidavit under s.53.055 within five days of filing.

The deadline that applies to retainage is s.53.052(d): the fifteenth day of the third month after the month in which the original contract was completed, terminated or abandoned. Set that against the thirty days in s.53.103 and look at what one page bought. The notice converts a thirty-day window on the reserved fund into one that runs months, and it is the exception s.53.103(2) points at. Per minute of paperwork, it is the best return in Chapter 53.

The affidavit does a second job worth knowing about. An owner who receives a monthly notice under s.53.056 may start withholding on the spot, but on a retainage claim s.53.081(c) authorises withholding only once the owner has a copy of your filed affidavit. The notice holds your place. The affidavit is what makes the owner's hand stop.

So the sequence is notice, then affidavit, then copy of the affidavit. Three pieces of paper, none of them long, and the first one buys the time to produce the other two.

Side by side

These deadlines are the post-HB 2237 set, which governs contracts entered into on or after 1 January 2022. One year to sue on the lien, all project types. The old split between residential and commercial on that suit deadline is gone, and it can be stretched to two years by written agreement with the owner recorded before it expires.

If the owner did not reserve anything, they answer for it with the property

This gets skipped. An owner pays the GC the whole progress draw, ten percent included, and there is no reserved fund on the day you go looking for one.

Texas puts the consequence on them, in s.53.105. If the owner fails or refuses to comply with the reserved-funds subchapter, the claimants who complied have a lien, at least to the extent of the amount that should have been reserved from the original contract they are claiming under, against the improvement and against the land necessarily connected to it. Claimants share that lien proportionately under the preferences in s.53.104.

Turn that around and look at what it means for your invoice. The ten percent is not tied to whether the money is sitting in an account. It attaches to the amount that should have been reserved, and it lands on the property. An owner who paid it all out to a general contractor who then went quiet has not made your claim disappear. They have made it their problem. The one word carrying that whole paragraph is "complied", and complying is a calendar exercise you can finish this week.

A calendar, counted

Commercial job in Tarrant County. Your subcontract has ten percent retainage. You finish your scope on 30 September 2026. The original contract completes on 20 November 2026.

Look at 30 October against 15 February. One page, sent in the week you closed out, is the difference between a reserved-fund claim that ends on 20 December and one that is still live seven weeks into the following year. Skip the October page and 20 December is the whole of it, because the default route in s.53.103 is the only one you kept.

Note the two affidavit rows as well. Your unpaid balance runs off your own last furnishing month and your retainage runs off the original contract's end, so they land in different months and the earlier one does not cover the later one.

Feed your dates into the Texas lien deadline calculator and it counts all of these off your furnishing months and your completion date, commercial or residential, without you doing the fifteenth-of-the-month arithmetic on a Friday afternoon. The full picture of the affidavit side sits in Texas mechanics lien deadlines.

On public jobs you are chasing a surety, and the retainage paper goes in at the start

There is no lien on a school district, so Texas gives public work better collateral instead. Those jobs run on a payment bond under Government Code Chapter 2253, posted by a surety whose entire business is paying claims. A lien is a cloud on somebody's title that you then have to foreclose. A bond is an insurer with a claims process, and under Chapter 2253 you can sue on it once the claim is unpaid on the sixty-first day after you mailed notice, with reasonable attorney fees recoverable. The entity has to require a payment bond on a contract over twenty-five thousand dollars, or over fifty thousand where it is a municipality or a joint board, and a performance bond over one hundred thousand, all under s.2253.021.

The calendar is the trade. On public work the retainage paper goes in at the start, which means it gets done while you still have momentum on the job rather than hanging over a closeout eight months later.

Start with how much they are allowed to hold. Gov't Code s.2252.032 caps it: on a contract worth less than five million dollars, retainage cannot exceed ten percent of the contract price, and at five million or more it drops to five percent, with dam construction and maintenance staying at ten whatever the value. The cap binds per line as well as in total, so a schedule of values holding a higher rate on one item and averaging it out elsewhere is over the line. That cap arrived with H.B. 692, effective 15 June 2021, which is recent enough that plenty of published commentary still describes the old position.

Two things run off that cap and both are money. Under s.2252.032(d) the rate flows down: a prime cannot withhold a greater percentage from you than the entity may withhold from the prime, so a subcontract offering ten percent on a job where the entity is capped at five is over-withholding from your first application. And under s.2252.032(e) the entity may not withhold retainage after completion of the work required under the contract, including through the warranty period. A holdback carried into warranty is a withholding by another name, so name it that way on the final application and ask what the basis is.

Below four hundred thousand dollars the subchapter does not reach the contract at all, under s.2252.033(2). That is a negotiating position rather than a gap. On a small public job the rate is whatever your agreement says, so put your number in at award, because your paper is the cap.

Then the notice. Under Gov't Code s.2253.047, a bond beneficiary without a direct contract with the prime whose agreement provides for retainage gives notice of that to the prime on or before the fifteenth day of the second month after the beginning of delivery of material or performance of labour. Not after the work ends. After it starts. If your first day on a public job was in March, that notice is due by 15 May, and it wants to go out with your first submittal package rather than be remembered in November. Send it by certified or registered mail, because s.2253.048 asks for that specifically.

Ask for it before you have to claim it

The paperwork above protects the ten percent. Getting it into your account is usually a smaller move, made earlier.

Once your contract makes retainage payable, a written request for it is a payment request like any other, and Chapter 28 starts counting. On a private job the owner owes payment by the thirty-fifth day after receiving the request under s.28.002, anyone who receives money covering a lower tier passes that share down within seven days, and overdue amounts carry interest at one and a half percent a month under s.28.004. Those terms are not waivable by contract. The mechanics of running that clock are in getting paid in 35 days in Texas.

So the working habit is short. When your scope closes out, do three things in the same week: put out a final application that names the retainage as its own line rather than a footnote, send the s.53.057 notice of claim for unpaid retainage, and ask in writing for the date the original contract completes, because both of your affidavit dates hang off that month. An owner who files an affidavit of completion has to send you a copy once you have given notice or asked in writing for one, so the written ask is what puts you on that list. The first and the third cost you fifteen minutes. The one in the middle is worth ten percent of the job.

If the retainage is already late and the answers have gone vague, the sequence of moves that gets money out of a Texas job is laid out in what to do when a client will not pay in Texas.

Put the ten percent on the board

Retainage goes missing because it lives in a different place from your invoices: in a closeout email, in a schedule of values that stayed closed, in the difference between what you billed and what landed. Tracked as a line with a date on it, it behaves like any other receivable.

AEC Stack keeps the retainage on each job visible with the notice dates counted from your own furnishing months, so the s.53.057 window and the s.53.103 window show up as two entries rather than one vague idea about the end of the job. There is no monthly subscription. The platform fee is 2.5% of each invoice processed through the platform, taken on the payment due date.

Count your dates in the Texas lien deadline calculator, then start your business file and put your open jobs and their held ten percents on one board.