Florida Payment Bond Claim Lawyer

On a bonded private project in Florida, an unpaid subcontractor or supplier usually cannot lien the property: the claim runs against the general contractor’s payment bond under section 713.23, Florida Statutes, a statute with its own notices, its own sworn forms, and its own one-year suit clock. That is the position you are in when the scope is finished, the pay applications went in on time, and the money stopped, and then you learned, checking your lien rights, that the job is bonded and the owner’s property is off the table.

Cory Cannon represents subcontractors, sub-subcontractors, and material suppliers across Tampa Bay in payment bond claims on bonded private projects. We serve the statutory notices, prepare the sworn notice of nonpayment, negotiate with the surety, and sue on the bond when the surety will not pay. I grew up around construction (a family history in the Florida construction trades going back generations), so when I read your pay applications, delivery tickets, and schedule of values, I read them the way the job actually ran, not the way the surety’s file summarizes it.

One scope note before anything else. This page covers private payment bonds under section 713.23. Public projects (city, county, school board, state) follow a different statute, section 255.05, with its own notice chain and its own suit deadline. If your unpaid job is public, or your dispute involves a performance bond rather than a payment bond, start with our performance bond and public project bond claims page. Federal jobs are different again: the federal Miller Act, 40 U.S.C. §§ 3131 through 3134, governs bonds on federal projects and carries its own notice and one-year suit rules in federal court.

What a Payment Bond Is and Why You Cannot Lien the Property

A payment bond is a three-party promise. The general contractor is the principal, whose payment obligations the bond backs. A surety (an insurance company authorized to write surety bonds in Florida) promises to pay the contractor’s subcontractors and suppliers if the contractor does not. The parties entitled to claim are the lien statute’s lienors: subcontractors, sub-subcontractors, laborers, and material suppliers who furnish to the contractor or a subcontractor. A supplier who sells only to another supplier has no bond rights: the same gap the lien law has.

Here is the trade the statute makes. When the contractor furnishes a payment bond meeting section 713.23’s requirements before construction begins, and a copy is attached to the notice of commencement (the document the owner records to start the lien-law clock), the property is exempt from most construction liens. The owner gets clean title; unpaid subs and suppliers get a solvent surety to pursue instead of the land. Your remedy moves from the property to the bond.

That trade only works if you know which regime you are in. On any nonpayment matter, the first thing we do is pull the notice of commencement from the county records and read what is attached. Three outcomes are possible:

• A proper unconditional payment bond is recorded. Your claim is against the bond. The deadlines below control, and a construction lien on the property is generally not available.
• No bond, or defective bond paperwork. If the bond was never furnished or never properly attached and referenced, lien rights may survive. We evaluate both tracks before choosing one.
• A conditional payment bond under section 713.245. A different animal entirely (covered below), where you may need to run the lien and bond tracks at once.

The Three Deadlines on a Bonded Private Job

Section 713.23 conditions recovery on two notices and one suit deadline. Miss any of them and the surety has a complete defense, no matter how clearly the money is owed. These are the statutory rules as of this writing; facts at the margins (what counts as first or final furnishing) move the dates. Run your dates through our construction lien and bond deadline calculator, then verify them with counsel before you rely on them.

The 45-day notice to contractor

If you contracted directly with the general contractor, your contract is your notice: you do not serve this one. Most everyone further down the chain does, with one exception the statute writes in: laborers who provide only their own labor are excused. Sub-subcontractors and suppliers to subcontractors must serve the contractor with written notice that they will look to the bond, before or within 45 days after starting to furnish. In practice, most credit departments serve a combined Notice to Owner / Notice to Contractor on every job, because on day one you often do not know whether the job is bonded, exempt, or lien-eligible, and one combined form, served on time, preserves your position either way. Our Notice to Owner guide explains that form from both the owner’s and the sub’s side.

The sworn notice of nonpayment

This is where bond claims die. The notice of nonpayment must be served on the contractor, with a copy to the surety, no later than 90 days after your final furnishing. Since 2019, it must be under oath, on the form set out in the statute, stating the nature of the labor or materials, the amount unpaid (including retainage, the percentage of each payment the contract holds back until completion), and unpaid finance charges due under your contract.

The oath has teeth. A lienor who serves a fraudulent notice of nonpayment (one that willfully exaggerates the amount unpaid or claims work never performed) forfeits its rights under the bond entirely. A minor mistake or a good-faith dispute about what is owed does not trigger forfeiture, but the statute puts a premium on getting the number right. Before we serve, we reconcile the notice against the pay applications, approved change orders, and delivery records, line by line. A defensible number is worth more than an aggressive one.

You do not have to wait until the job ends: the notice may be served during the work, as soon as amounts are unpaid. And “final furnishing” means your last day providing labor, services, or materials under the contract: warranty visits and punch-list touch-ups generally do not extend it, so counting your 90 days from a courtesy repair can make you late.

The one-year suit deadline and the 60-day trap

You must sue the contractor and the surety within one year of your last day of furnishing. Note what that is not: not one year from the notice of nonpayment, and not from a recorded claim of lien, because there is no claim of lien on a bonded job. On a project that drags on after your scope is done, the bond clock can run out while the job is still active. The contractor also controls a shortcut: by recording and serving a Notice of Contest of Claim Against Payment Bond, it cuts your remaining time to sue to 60 days. When that notice arrives, filing is no longer strategic: it is arithmetic. Check your clock with the deadline calculator and call counsel the same week.

Bond Claim vs. Lien Claim: Different Defendant, Different Clock

Subs who know the lien statute sometimes assume the bond statute works the same way. The notice architecture rhymes (a 45-day front-end notice, a 90-day back-end deadline), but the claims differ in ways that decide cases:

• The defendant. A lien encumbers the owner’s property and is enforced by foreclosure; a bond claim is a money suit against the contractor and surety, with the owner out of it.
• The back-end filing. A lien-eligible job takes a recorded claim of lien within 90 days of final furnishing; a bonded job takes a sworn notice of nonpayment in the same window. A lien recorded against exempt property preserves nothing and can create exposure.
• The one-year trigger. Lien foreclosure runs one year from recording the lien; a bond suit runs one year from your final furnishing, usually the earlier expiry.
• The leverage. A lien clouds title and pressures the owner; a bond claim pressures the contractor, whose surety recovers from him every dollar it pays. Different targets, both effective.

If your records leave any doubt about which regime applies, we run the analysis before the 90-day window closes, while both doors are open. Our construction lien page covers the lien track in the same detail.

Conditional Payment Bonds Under Section 713.245

Florida also permits a hybrid the statute calls a conditional payment bond, governed by section 713.245. It must say “conditional payment bond” on its face and warn prominently that it covers claims only to the extent the contractor has been paid for the claimant’s work. In plain terms: if the owner paid the contractor for your scope and the contractor kept the money, the surety pays; if the owner never paid the contractor, the surety owes nothing on that portion, but the property is not exempt, and your lien rights survive to that extent.

So a conditional payment bond puts you on two tracks at once: serve your notice to owner and record your claim of lien as if the job were unbonded, and serve your bond notices as if it were bonded. After you record the lien, the owner or contractor may record a notice of bond with a sworn certificate of payment, moving some or all of the lien to the bond, and the fight becomes an accounting question: what did the owner actually pay the contractor for your work? That is a documents case (pay applications, joint checks, lien releases, the payment ledger), and it rewards line-by-line reconstruction. The first step, always, is reading the face of the bond. Do not assume “bonded job” means “no lien.”

Public Projects and Federal Jobs Are Different

None of the above applies to public work. On projects for the state, a county, a city, a school board, or another public entity, you cannot lien public property at all; section 255.05 (Florida’s “Little Miller Act”) substitutes a statutory payment bond with its own notice chain and one-year suit limit that differ from section 713.23. We cover public bond claims, performance bond disputes on public and private jobs, and the federal Miller Act projects noted above, on our performance bond and public project claims page. If you are not sure whether your project is public or private (design-build work for authorities and special districts blurs the line), tell us who signed the prime contract and we will sort the regime before any notice goes out.

How Sureties Defend Payment Bond Claims and How We Prepare Yours

A surety is not a bank teller. When your notice of nonpayment arrives, it opens a claim file, requests your contract and backup, and evaluates the claim the way an adjuster evaluates a loss: looking first for a reason not to pay. The recurring defenses are predictable:

• Notice defects. A late 45-day notice, a notice of nonpayment served on day 91, a form that was not sworn: each is a complete defense, and each is preventable, which is why we calendar every date on day one.
• Final furnishing disputes. The surety argues your last real work was earlier than you claim, making the 90-day notice or the one-year suit late. Daily logs, delivery tickets, and time records win this; memory does not.
• Releases. The lien waivers signed at each pay application usually release bond rights too, and one drafted broader than the payment it accompanies gives away claims you meant to keep. Read our FAQ on signing lien waivers before the next draw.
• Setoffs and backcharges. The contractor asserts defective work, delay, or supplementation costs against your balance, and the surety adopts the defense. We answer with the project record: approved pay applications, inspection sign-offs, and the absence of contemporaneous complaints.
• Contract payment conditions. Depending on the bond and subcontract wording, the surety may argue a pay-if-paid clause (making the owner’s payment to the contractor a condition of your right to be paid) limits the bond. Whether that holds turns on the specific bond language, one of the first things we read.

Our answer is documentation discipline. We build the claim the way we would have to prove it at trial: the subcontract and every executed change order, the schedule of values, each pay application against each payment received, delivery tickets tied to the job, and a clean ledger of the unpaid balance including retainage. A trial-ready file gets evaluated differently than a stack of invoices. Where your balance includes disputed extras or acceleration costs, our construction payment dispute page covers how those get proved against the contractor.

One Tampa Bay pattern deserves its own note: the payment chain stalls because the owner is fighting its property insurance carrier (a hurricane claim under review, a water loss underpaid), and no money moves down to the contractor or subs. Your bond deadlines do not pause for the owner’s insurance dispute; serve your notices on schedule regardless. And if you are the owner in that picture, the problem is a carrier problem, not a construction one. Start with our property insurance claims practice.

Attorney’s Fees and How We Charge

Florida shifts fees in bond litigation. Under section 713.29, the prevailing party in an action to enforce a claim against a payment bond under part I of chapter 713 recovers a reasonable attorney’s fee. That cuts both ways: it disciplines inflated claims and pressures stonewalling sureties, who know a well-documented claim that goes the distance costs them the claim plus your fees.

For bond and payment work we may charge hourly or flat fees scoped to the stage of the claim (notice service, surety negotiation, suit), with the fee-shifting statute available to recover those costs from the losing party when we prevail. For some claims a contingency or hybrid arrangement makes sense; we will tell you plainly which structure fits your numbers before you commit. Our FAQ on who pays attorney’s fees in construction disputes covers the broader landscape, including fee clauses in your subcontract.

Unpaid on a Bonded Job in Tampa Bay?

Payment bond deadlines do not reward waiting. The 90-day notice window closes on the calendar, not on the general contractor’s promises, and a notice of contest can compress your suit deadline to 60 days without warning. Run your dates through the construction lien and bond deadline calculator, then contact Cory Cannon for a free consultation: bring your subcontract, pay applications, and the notice of commencement if you have it, and we will tell you where your claim stands and what must be served this week.

Cory Cannon handles payment bond claims for subcontractors and suppliers throughout Tampa Bay, alongside the rest of our construction litigation practice. If you run a contracting business and want the notice-and-deadline side handled as a system, see how we work with contractors and subcontractors.