Construction Lien Foreclosure Attorney

A recorded claim of lien is not payment. It is a deadline. Under section 713.22(1), Florida Statutes, a construction lien expires one year after it is recorded unless the lienor files a lawsuit to enforce it within that year. The owner can cut that year down to 60 days with one recorded notice, or to roughly 20 days with a court summons. None of those clocks pause while you negotiate, send demand letters, or wait for a promised check.

Cory Cannon represents contractors, subcontractors, and material suppliers across Tampa Bay who have recorded a claim of lien and now need to enforce it. “Foreclosure” here means what it sounds like: a lawsuit asking the court to order the property sold, or the posted security paid out, to satisfy the amount the lien secures. It is the step that converts a piece of recorded paper into leverage a court will act on.

This page assumes your lien already exists. If you have not yet recorded, or you are still inside the notice and recording windows, start with our construction lien lawyer page, which covers the filing stage. For the broader picture of how we handle payment disputes for the trades, see our construction litigation practice.

Your Lien Has an Expiration Date

Section 713.22(1) is blunt. A lien under Florida’s Construction Lien Law “does not continue for a longer period than 1 year after the claim of lien has been recorded” unless, within that time, an action to enforce the lien is commenced in a court of competent jurisdiction. Commencing an action means filing the foreclosure lawsuit: not sending a demand, not recording something new, not getting a payment promise in writing.

Two details in that subsection matter in practice:

• The one year runs from recording, not from when payment was due. If your claim of lien was recorded on March 1, the suit must be on file by the following March 1, whatever the state of your negotiations. If an amended claim of lien was recorded showing a later date of final furnishing, the statute measures one year from the amended claim: a narrow exception, not a workaround. Re-recording the same lien does not restart the clock.
• The lawsuit alone is not enough to protect you against third parties. Section 713.22(1) provides that a lien continued past the one-year mark by a lawsuit is not good against creditors or subsequent purchasers for value without notice unless a notice of lis pendens is recorded. A lis pendens (Latin for “suit pending”) is a recorded notice telling the world that litigation affecting the property is underway. We record it with the complaint as a matter of course.

If you are working from memory on your recording date, stop and check the recorded instrument. Then run the date through our construction lien deadline calculator to see where your enforcement window actually stands.

Two Ways an Owner Can Shorten Your Clock

Owners and their counsel know the one-year period is generous, and Chapter 713 gives them two tools to compress it. Both are routine moves in Florida, and both are easy to miss if no one is watching the mail at the address on your lien.

The Notice of Contest of Lien: 60 days

Under section 713.22(2), the owner or the owner’s attorney may record a short form called a Notice of Contest of Lien with the clerk of court. The clerk serves a copy on the lienor at the address shown in the claim of lien. From the date of service, the lienor has 60 days to file suit to enforce the lien. Miss it, and the lien is extinguished automatically: no hearing, no court order, no second chance on the lien itself.

Note the trap built into the service rule: the clerk serves the address on the face of your recorded lien. If your office moved, if the lien listed a P.O. box no one checks, or if the notice sits in an accounts-receivable inbox for three weeks, the 60 days runs anyway.

The show-cause summons: about 20 days

The faster tool is section 713.21(4). Any interested party, usually the owner, may file a complaint asking the circuit court to discharge the lien. The clerk then issues a summons requiring the lienor to show cause, within 20 days after service, why the lien should not be enforced by action or vacated and canceled of record. If the lienor fails to show cause, or fails to commence an enforcement action by the return date, the statute directs the court to order the lien canceled.

In practice, “showing cause” means filing your foreclosure claim. Twenty days is a short runway to assemble a contract, pay applications, and lien documents into a complaint, which is exactly why owners use this device: it forces underprepared lienors to fold. If a show-cause summons arrives, treat it as the front end of your foreclosure case, because that is what it is.

Lien Enforcement Deadlines at a Glance

These deadlines come from the current statutes, but legislatures amend Chapter 713 regularly and the way a deadline applies turns on facts: recording dates, service dates, who signed what. Confirm your specific dates with a construction attorney before relying on any table, including this one. For a first pass, our lien deadline calculator will map your recording date against each clock.

Before You File: The Contractor’s Final Payment Affidavit

If you are the contractor (meaning you contracted directly with the owner) Florida adds a prerequisite most trades learn about the hard way. Under section 713.06(3)(d), the contractor must execute a final payment affidavit (a sworn statement listing any subcontractors and suppliers who remain unpaid) and deliver it to the owner at least 5 days before filing the lien enforcement action. The statute makes the affidavit a prerequisite to the lawsuit, and it applies even where the contract was terminated before completion and even where the contractor has no unpaid subs at all.

The statute shows some mercy on content: a negligent inclusion or omission in the affidavit does not, by itself, defeat an otherwise valid lien absent prejudice to the owner. Skipping the affidavit entirely is a different matter. It is a clean procedural defense handed to the owner, and it burns days you may not have if a 60-day or 20-day clock is already running. Subcontractors and suppliers without a direct contract with the owner do not give this affidavit: it is the contractor’s obligation.

What a Lien Foreclosure Lawsuit Involves

A foreclosure action under Chapter 713 is a civil lawsuit filed in the county where the project sits. In broad strokes, the case runs like this:

• Complaint and lis pendens. We plead the lien count (and usually companion counts, such as breach of contract) and record the notice of lis pendens against the property.
• Parties. The owner is the core defendant. Depending on the goal, other parties with recorded interests in the property may need to be joined so the judgment binds them.
• Proof. Lien cases are document cases. The contract, pay applications, approved change orders, delivery tickets, daily logs, and the lien paperwork itself decide most of them. We build the case from your job file, and we read those documents the way they were written on the job: line by line, against the schedule of values.
• Judgment. If the lien is enforced, the judgment directs sale of the property to satisfy the lien, or payment from the security, if the lien was transferred to a bond or cash deposit.

Most of these cases settle before sale. A recorded lis pendens and a well-pleaded foreclosure count change the owner’s math: the property cannot be sold or refinanced cleanly while the case is pending, and the fee exposure under section 713.29 compounds the longer it runs. When settlement comes, it typically trades payment for a satisfaction of lien and releases: documents worth reading carefully before signing. Our FAQ on lien waivers covers the common traps.

The defenses owners raise: why we audit your numbers first

Expect the owner to contest the amount, the quality of the work, or the paperwork. One defense deserves particular respect: under Chapter 713, a lien that is willfully exaggerated, claiming amounts for work not performed or materials not furnished, can be found fraudulent, which defeats enforcement and can expose the lienor to damages. This is why we pressure-test the lien amount against the pay applications and change-order log before we file, not after the owner’s lawyer does. An honest lien for the right number is a strong instrument. An inflated one is a liability.

If the Lien Is Transferred to a Bond

Owners who need to sell, refinance, or simply clear title often use section 713.24 to move your lien off the property and onto security: either cash deposited with the clerk or a surety bond (a guarantee issued by an insurance company). The required security equals the amount demanded in the claim of lien, plus interest at the legal rate for 3 years, plus the greater of $5,000 or 25 percent of the lien amount as a cushion for attorney’s fees and costs. If the cushion proves insufficient to cover your fees and costs in the enforcement action, the statute directs the court to increase the security.

Two things to understand when the transfer notice arrives:

• Your claim survives; your target changes. The lawsuit proceeds against the security instead of the real estate. For many lienors this is an improvement: a cash deposit or a solvent surety is often a more certain source of payment than a forced sale of property with a mortgage ahead of you.
• Your deadline does not change. Under section 713.24(4), if no proceeding to enforce the transferred lien is commenced within the time set by section 713.22, the clerk returns the security to whoever posted it. The one-year clock (or the shortened 60-day clock, if a notice of contest was served) keeps running against the bond exactly as it ran against the land.

Attorney’s Fees Cut Both Ways

Under section 713.29, the prevailing party in an action to enforce a lien, including a lien transferred to security, recovers a reasonable attorney’s fee. That is real leverage for an unpaid contractor with clean paperwork, and it is a real risk in the other direction: if the owner prevails, the owner recovers fees from you. Florida courts decide who “prevailed” by asking who won on the significant issues in the case, not simply who holds a judgment, so a lienor who recovers a fraction of an inflated claim can find the fee question uncomfortable.

We will not predict outcomes, and we will not file a number we have not tested. What we will do is put the fee exposure, yours and theirs, into the strategy from day one, because in lien litigation the fee clause often drives settlement harder than the principal. For a fuller discussion, see our FAQ on who pays attorney’s fees in construction disputes.

How We Charge for Lien Enforcement

Lien enforcement for contractors and subs is business litigation, and we price it that way: hourly or flat-fee by stage, scoped in writing before we start, with the section 713.29 fee-shift pursued as part of the recovery where the case supports it. On the right facts we will discuss hybrid structures. What we will not do is quote a fee before we have read the lien, the contract, and the dates: the same documents that decide whether the case is worth filing at all.

If the Deadline Passed or the Lien Has Problems

An expired lien is gone: the security interest in the property cannot be revived. The debt, however, usually is not. Breach of contract, account, and related payment claims carry their own limitations periods and survive the lien’s expiration. If your lien lapsed, or if a defect in the lien makes enforcement unwise, our construction payment dispute practice covers the remaining routes to collection.

Check the project type, too. If a payment bond was in place on the job (common on larger private projects and required on public work, where liens are unavailable) your claim may run against the surety instead of the property, on its own notice deadlines and its own one-year suit limit. Our payment bond claim page walks through those regimes.

One more pattern we see in Tampa Bay: the owner is not paying you because their insurance carrier has not paid them, especially on storm-repair work. Your lien deadlines do not wait for the adjuster, so the enforcement track proceeds on its own schedule, but if the real bottleneck is a stalled or underpaid claim, the owner may need help from the other side of our practice. We handle carrier disputes for policyholders through our property insurance claims practice, and sometimes solving the owner’s insurance problem is the fastest way to solve your receivable.

Why Bring Enforcement Work to Cory Cannon

I am a Florida attorney with a family history in construction for generations. That background shows up in how we work a lien case: we read pay applications, schedules of values, and change-order logs the way they are read in a job trailer, and we check the numbers in a claim against what the job records actually support before we swear to them in a foreclosure complaint. When a dispute turns on scope or cost, we check the figures against real bids from licensed local contractors rather than accepting either side’s spreadsheet.

We handle these cases in the circuit courts around Tampa Bay, and we build every file on the assumption it will be tried: the posture that puts a lienor in the strongest position whether the case settles or not. More on how we work with the trades is set out in our guide for Florida contractors and subs.

Talk to a Lien Foreclosure Attorney Before the Clock Decides for You

Pull your recorded claim of lien and note the recording date. Check whether anything from the clerk of court has arrived at the address on its face. Then run your dates through the construction lien deadline calculator and contact us for a free consultation. Bring the lien, the contract, and your payment records: we will tell you plainly how much time you have, what the case looks like, and whether it is worth filing. The one answer that is never right is waiting.