Florida Construction Lien Lawyer

You furnished the labor, the services, or the materials. The invoice is past due, and the property you improved is still holding your money. Florida law gives contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers a direct remedy for that problem: a construction lien, a claim recorded against the improved real estate itself, so the debt attaches to the property instead of resting on promises.

The trade-off is procedure. Chapter 713, Part I of the Florida Statutes grants lien rights only to those who complete its notice and recording steps exactly and on time. The deadlines are short, they run from dates buried in your own job records, and most of them cannot be repaired once they pass. Cory Cannon prepares, serves, and records construction liens for contractors, subcontractors, and material suppliers across Tampa Bay, and we build each lien to hold up under the scrutiny it will face if the dispute reaches a courtroom.

This page covers the filing-and-perfecting stage: securing the debt against the property. If your lien is already recorded and payment still has not come, enforcing it is a foreclosure action, which we handle and explain on our lien foreclosure page. And if the lien is only one piece of a larger receivables problem, start with our construction payment dispute overview.

Florida Construction Lien Deadlines at a Glance

These are the deadlines that decide whether your lien exists. Each is discussed in detail below.

Every one of these clocks runs from a fact question: when you first furnished, when you last furnished, when a document was recorded or served. Getting that date wrong is the most common way lien rights die. Run your dates through our construction lien deadline calculator, then confirm them with a lawyer before you rely on them. The calculator flags the windows; it does not replace a review of your actual job records.

What Is a Construction Lien?

A construction lien (historically called a mechanics lien, a name the trade still uses even though Florida’s statute is now titled the Construction Lien Law) is a recorded legal claim against real property for the unpaid value of labor, services, or materials that improved it. Once recorded, the lien becomes part of the property’s title record. The owner cannot sell, refinance, or (in most cases) close out a construction loan without dealing with it.

That is the entire point. A past-due invoice is a request. A recorded lien is an encumbrance: a cloud on title that converts your receivable into a property problem the owner and the owner’s lender have to solve. The lien secures the amount owed under your contract for what you actually furnished, plus unpaid finance charges due under the contract, and it carries the possibility of prevailing-party attorney fees under section 713.29 if enforcement becomes necessary. A lien that was perfected correctly changes the tone of a payment conversation quickly, because everyone on the other side can see it will survive a challenge.

A lien that was perfected incorrectly does the opposite. It invites a fight over procedure instead of a conversation about money, and under Florida’s fee-shifting rules, losing that fight can mean paying the other side’s lawyers. The mechanics of the lien matter more than the merits of the debt.

Who Has Lien Rights in Florida?

Florida’s lien law sorts everyone on a project by privity: a legal term that here means having a direct contract with the owner. Your position in the contracting chain determines which steps you must take.

• General contractors and anyone else in direct contract with the owner have lien rights without serving a preliminary notice, but they carry a different obligation: the final payment affidavit, covered below.
• Subcontractors and sub-subcontractors have lien rights only if they serve a timely Notice to Owner.
• Material suppliers to the owner, the contractor, a subcontractor, or a sub-subcontractor have lien rights, again, conditioned on the Notice to Owner when they lack a direct contract with the owner. A supplier to another supplier has no lien rights at all under the statute’s definitions.
• Laborers have lien rights and are exempt from the Notice to Owner requirement.
• Architects, engineers, surveyors, and other design professionals have lien rights under a separate section of the lien law with its own rules.

Two threshold problems can eliminate lien rights before any deadline is reached. First, licensing: under section 489.128, a contractor who was unlicensed for work that requires a license cannot enforce the contract, which means no lien. If you are on the other side of that problem, hiring rather than being one, see our unlicensed contractor page. Second, the security may not be the property at all: if the project carries a payment bond under section 713.23, or is public work under section 255.05 where liens are unavailable, your remedy runs against the bond (different notices, different deadlines) covered on our payment bond claim page.

How to File a Construction Lien in Florida

The sequence is short. The discipline is in the dates.

1. Confirm your lien rights. Check your position in the contracting chain, your licensing status, and whether the project is bonded or public.
2. Serve a Notice to Owner within 45 days of first furnishing if you do not have a direct contract with the owner.
3. Track your final furnishing date and prepare the Claim of Lien while the job is fresh, not on day 85.
4. Record the Claim of Lien within 90 days of final furnishing in the county where the property sits, and serve it on the owner within 15 days of recording.
5. Calendar the enforcement deadline. The lien expires one year after recording, sooner if the owner contests it, unless suit is filed.

Each step has failure modes worth understanding. The next sections walk through them.

The Notice to Owner: 45 Days From First Furnishing

The Notice to Owner (NTO in trade shorthand) is not a lien. It is a statutory notice that tells the owner you are on the project and preserves your right to record a lien later. Under section 713.06(2)(a), every lienor without a direct contract with the owner, except laborers, must serve it before starting work or within 45 days after first furnishing labor, services, or materials. Sub-subcontractors and suppliers to subcontractors must also serve a copy on the general contractor.

The statute is explicit about the consequence: failing to serve the notice, or serving it late, is a complete defense to enforcement of the lien. Florida courts require strict compliance with the timing. There is no substantial-compliance argument for a notice served on day 46, no matter how obvious the debt.

Three details in the 45-day rule catch people who otherwise run tight operations:

• The clock starts at first furnishing, not first invoicing. Delivering material to the site, mobilizing labor, performing the first day of work. The earliest of these starts the count.
• Specially fabricated materials start the clock at fabrication. Florida law treats fabrication of specially fabricated materials as furnishing, so the 45 days runs from when fabrication begins, which can be weeks before anything reaches the job.
• There is a second, earlier cutoff. Whatever the 45-day math says, the notice must land before the owner disburses final payment in reliance on the contractor’s final payment affidavit. On a job that finishes fast, the money can be gone before your 45 days are up.

The information you need for the NTO (the owner’s name and address, the property description, the lender, any designated notice recipients) should come from the Notice of Commencement, a document the owner records under section 713.13 before work begins and posts at the site. If no Notice of Commencement was recorded, the statute lets you rely on the building permit application. Pull these documents at the start of every job, not when trouble starts; the addresses in them control where your notices must go.

Service must follow the methods in section 713.18 (certified mail is the workhorse) and the notice content must track the statutory form. Errors in content are forgiven if they do not prejudice anyone; errors in timing are not forgiven at all. We cover the mechanics, the forms, and the owner’s side of this document in our Notice to Owner guide, and our lien deadline calculator will compute your 45-day window from your first furnishing date.

The NTO also does quiet work beyond preserving your lien. Section 713.06 ties the owner’s payment obligations to the notices received: once your NTO is in hand, the owner is supposed to account for you when disbursing on the direct contract, and payments made without doing so can be held “improper,” leaving the property exposed to your lien even if the owner already paid the general contractor in full. The flip side is a ceiling: the total of all liens under one direct contract generally cannot exceed the contract price the owner agreed to pay. Early notice puts you inside that accounting from the start. Late notice leaves you outside it, with no lien and a claim against whoever hired you, often the party that stopped paying in the first place.

The Claim of Lien: 90 Days From Final Furnishing

The Claim of Lien is the lien: the sworn document that, once recorded, encumbers the property. Under section 713.08(5), it may be recorded at any time during the work but no later than 90 days after your final furnishing of labor, services, or materials.

Final furnishing is where the fights happen. The 90 days runs from the last day you performed real contract work on the project: not from your invoice date, not from the certificate of occupancy, and not from the last time you set foot on site. Returning to handle punch-list items, warranty calls, or corrective work generally does not restart the clock, and courts look skeptically at token site visits that appear designed to revive an expired window. If your crews demobilized in March and you patched a wall in June, assume the 90 days ran from March and act accordingly. One more wrinkle: if the owner terminates the general contract under section 713.07(4), a lien that attached before the termination must be recorded within 90 days of the termination if that comes first.

The Claim of Lien itself is a sworn statement with contents fixed by section 713.08(1): your name and address, who hired you, what you furnished and its contract price or value, a legal description of the property, the owner’s name, the first and last furnishing dates, the unpaid amount, and, for lienors who had to serve an NTO, the date and method of that service. It must be signed and sworn, and it must carry the statutory warning language. Negligent errors that do not prejudice the owner will not defeat an otherwise valid lien, but every error is an invitation to litigate the lien instead of paying it.

Recording happens at the clerk’s office in the county where the property sits (Hillsborough, Pinellas, Manatee, or Sarasota for most Tampa Bay projects) and in every county the property touches if it spans more than one. Local clerks accept e-recording, so a finished Claim of Lien can usually be on record the same day; the slow part is getting the legal description right, which should come from the deed or the Notice of Commencement rather than a tax bill or a proposal. Then comes the step that gets skipped: under section 713.08(4)(c), you must serve the Claim of Lien on the owner before recording or within 15 days after. Miss that service and the lien becomes voidable to the extent the delay prejudiced someone entitled to rely on it. Do not test the boundaries of “prejudice.” Serve it on time.

A recorded claim can be amended during the original 90-day window, so long as no one who relied on the original in good faith is harmed. After day 90, you live with what was recorded.

The Contractor’s Final Payment Affidavit

General contractors and others in direct contract with the owner skip the NTO but pick up a different prerequisite. Under section 713.06(3)(d), the contractor must give the owner a sworn final payment affidavit (stating that all lienors who served notice have been paid, or listing exactly who remains unpaid and how much) and must deliver it at least 5 days before filing any lawsuit to enforce the lien.

The statute is blunt about the consequence: a contractor in default of the affidavit requirement has no lien or right of action against the owner for the work. The requirement applies even if the contract ended by termination rather than completion, and even if the contractor had no subcontractors at all. It is a five-minute document that has ended six-figure claims when it was forgotten. We prepare it as a standard part of every contractor-side lien package.

Getting the Number Right: Fraudulent Lien Exposure

The amount on the Claim of Lien deserves the same rigor as the deadlines. Under section 713.31, a lien that willfully exaggerates the amount owed, includes work never performed or materials never furnished, or was compiled with gross negligence amounting to willful exaggeration is a fraudulent lien. The consequences stack: the entire lien becomes unenforceable (including the legitimate part), the lienor faces liability for the owner’s damages, costs, attorney fees, and punitive damages, and willfully filing a fraudulent lien is a third-degree felony.

The statute protects honest disputes. A minor mistake, or a good-faith disagreement about what is owed (a contested change order, a delay claim with real support) does not make a lien fraudulent. The line is between a number you can defend from your records and a number inflated for leverage. Our practice is to build the lien amount the way it will be cross-examined: from the contract, approved and pending change orders, pay applications, the schedule of values, and delivery tickets, with each component traceable to a document. If a component cannot be supported, it does not go in the lien; it goes in the breach-of-contract claim, where an overstatement is an argument rather than a felony.

After Recording: The Clock Keeps Running

Recording the lien secures the debt; it does not collect it. Under section 713.22(1), a Florida construction lien lasts one year from recording. If no enforcement action is filed within that year, the lien expires automatically: no motion, no hearing, just gone.

The owner can compress that timeline dramatically. Recording and serving a Notice of Contest of Lien under section 713.22(2) cuts your window to 60 days from service; miss it and the lien is extinguished by operation of law. A court summons to show cause under section 713.21(4) can require you to respond within 20 days. These devices arrive by mail while negotiations feel productive, and they are routinely used for exactly that reason. If the owner transfers your lien to a cash deposit or surety bond, your claim continues against the security; the deadlines do not pause.

Enforcement itself (the foreclosure lawsuit, lis pendens, and trial strategy) is the subject of our lien foreclosure page. For filing purposes, the rule is simple: calendar the one-year date the day the lien is recorded, treat any contest notice as a fire alarm, and put your dates into the deadline calculator so nothing depends on memory.

Common Mistakes That Kill Florida Liens

These are the failure patterns that most often kill Florida liens:

• Counting the 45 days from the contract or the invoice instead of from first furnishing, or forgetting that fabrication of custom materials starts the clock early.
• Treating punch-list or warranty work as final furnishing and recording the Claim of Lien after the real 90-day window closed.
• Wrong owner, wrong property description. The Notice of Commencement and the county property appraiser records exist to prevent this; use them on every job.
• Skipping the copy to the contractor. Sub-subcontractors and suppliers to subcontractors must serve the general contractor with the NTO, not just the owner.
• Padding the lien amount with unsupported extras, converting a collection tool into fraudulent-lien exposure under section 713.31.
• Signing broad lien waivers with progress payments that release more than the payment covered. Read every waiver against the money actually received. Our lien waiver FAQ explains what to look for.
• Missing a Notice of Contest in the mail and discovering the 60-day window after it closed.
• Negotiating past the one-year mark. Settlement talks do not toll the enforcement deadline. Ever.

Who Pays Attorney Fees in a Lien Case?

Florida lien enforcement carries two-way fee-shifting: under section 713.29, the prevailing party in a lien action recovers reasonable attorney fees from the loser. That cuts both ways, and it is one more reason perfection matters: a lienor who loses on a procedural defect can end up funding the owner’s defense.

For the fee arrangement itself, most filing-and-perfecting work (notices to owner, claims of lien, final payment affidavits, demand letters) fits predictable flat-fee or hourly engagements, and when a case proceeds to enforcement, the fee-shifting statute becomes part of the recovery strategy. We explain how these structures work across different dispute types in our attorney fees FAQ.

How Cory Cannon Approaches Lien Work

Lien practice rewards firms that treat paperwork as evidence. I come from a family with generations in the Florida construction trades, and it shows in how I work a file: pay applications, schedules of values, delivery tickets, and job-cost reports read to us like the primary sources they are, not like exhibits that need a translator. When we set a lien amount, we can tell the difference between retainage properly withheld and money being slow-walked, and between a real backcharge and a manufactured one.

Our process for a lien engagement is consistent: audit the deadlines first, against your actual first- and final-furnishing records rather than your assumptions; pull the Notice of Commencement and permit records; prepare and serve the notices the statute requires; record and serve the Claim of Lien; and pair the lien with a demand that gives the owner and lender a clean path to resolving it. Where the lien is one front in a wider fight (retainage, prompt-payment interest, contract claims) we coordinate it with the rest, as described on our payment dispute page and across our construction litigation practice. Contractors who want the broader picture of how we work with builders, subs, and suppliers is on our page for contractors and suppliers.

One situation deserves its own flag: sometimes the owner is not refusing to pay so much as waiting on insurance money that has not come. If your receivable is stuck behind an owner’s underpaid or delayed property claim, the fastest route to your payment may run through the carrier dispute. See our property insurance claims practice for how we handle that side.

Talk to a Florida Construction Lien Lawyer

If you are owed money on a Florida project, the calendar is already moving, and it started on dates recorded in your own job files. Cory Cannon handles construction lien and mechanics lien work for contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers throughout Tampa Bay, including Hillsborough, Pinellas, Manatee, and Sarasota counties. The initial consultation is free: bring your contract, your pay applications, and your furnishing dates, and we will tell you plainly which deadlines are live, which have passed, and what the lien is worth as leverage. Contact us to get the dates on a calendar before they decide the case for you.