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A RocketLevel guide, backed by decades of experience in the trade. Commercial and public work gives you powerful tools to secure payment, mechanics liens and bond claims, but they only work if you protect them in advance, sometimes with a notice sent within days of starting. Miss the window and you forfeit the right.
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Reviewed October 2026. Lien and bond-claim laws change, and they vary by state. Use this page to know what to ask, then confirm with your state agency or a construction attorney before you rely on it.
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Preliminary / pre-lien notice. Sent early to preserve lien rights. Whether it is required is set by your state's lien statute, so look up yours, and where it is required it applies even if you never file.
Notice of intent to lien. A warning before filing; often enough on its own to get you paid.
Mechanics lien. A claim against private commercial property for unpaid work, with a strict filing deadline. Do not assume that deadline runs from your last day on the job. Which event starts it differs by state, and getting this wrong is how the remedy is lost while the contractor still believes it is alive. California runs off completion of the work of improvement, which can be triggered by a 60-day cessation of labor nobody tells you about, under Civil Code 8180. New York runs off completion of the contract or your final performance of work or furnishing of materials, under Lien Law 10. Texas uses two different triggers depending on your position: an original contractor holding the owner's contract counts from the month its own work was completed, terminated, or abandoned under Property Code 53.052(a), while anyone below the original contractor counts from the month it last furnished labor or materials under 53.052(b) or (c).
Texas repealed its accrual section, 53.053, effective 1 January 2022, so ignore any guide that still counts from the date the claim accrued. Then read the transition clause, because it is not in the code and you will not find it by opening Chapter 53. Section 37 of HB 2237 applies the 2022 changes only to an original contract entered into on or after 1 January 2022, and leaves an original contract signed before that date governed by the law as it stood immediately before. On work running under a Master Service Agreement (MSA) or a master contract signed in 2021 or earlier, the repealed accrual rule can still be the one that decides your deadline. Find the triggering event in your own statute before you calendar anything.
Bond claim (public work). Against the payment bond instead of the property; Miller Act federally, Little Miller Acts by state.
Retainage timing. Know when retainage is legally due and the clock to claim it, and check whether your state gives retainage its own separate deadline rather than folding it into the main one. Texas does, but read who it reaches before you calendar anything. Property Code 53.052(d) applies only to a claimant other than an original contractor. For those claimants the retainage affidavit runs off the 15th day of the third month after the original contract they worked under was completed, terminated, or abandoned, which is a different date from their own last furnishing. If you hold the owner's contract you are the original contractor, there is no separate retainage date for you at all, and your retainage rides on the 53.052(a) filing described above. Calendaring a (d) date you do not have is its own kind of error, because it tells you the remedy is alive on a day it is not.
Federal work is the counter-example, and the difference is worth knowing before you rely on either. The Miller Act's one-year suit limit at 40 U.S.C. 3133(b)(4) carries no retainage carve-out. Some state analogues handle retainage on its own track: Florida's, at Fla. Stat. 255.05(10), still runs a one-year clock on a retainage action but bars bringing it until one of four conditions precedent is met, and extends the window to 120 days after that condition where the year would otherwise run out first. Confirm retainage timing in the statute that actually governs your job rather than assuming the main deadline covers it.
Five to ten percent is the range you will be offered on a commercial contract, which is RocketLevel's working figure. Customary is not the same as permitted, and this is one of the few places in the payment chain where a number written into a signed contract can simply be unenforceable. Whether your state caps retainage, at what percentage, above what contract size, with what carve-outs, and on what release clock, is set by that state's statute. Three are set out below against the statute text (state rules as of October 2026). For anywhere else, pull your own state's statute, and check separately whether it requires retainage to step down at a completion milestone or to be held in a separate or interest-bearing account, because those are written state by state too.
California. Civil Code 8811 caps a retention withheld by an owner from the direct contractor at 5 percent of the payment, and provides that in no event shall the total retention proceeds withheld exceed 5 percent of the contract price. Read the date before you read the number. It reaches contracts entered into on or after January 1, 2026, so it does not touch a contract signed before that line, which is the part people miss on a job they are billing today. Two carve-outs. It does not apply on a residential project that is not mixed-use and does not exceed four stories. And it does not protect a subcontractor who was given written notice before the bid request that a performance and payment bond would be required and then failed to furnish one.
New York. General Business Law 756-c lets an owner retain no more than five per centum of the contract sum, holds a contractor or subcontractor to the same five percent and to no more than the percentage the owner itself retained, and requires release no later than thirty days after final approval of the work, with interest at one percent per month on anything held past that. A contract term demanding more is void under 757. Coverage is the half that gets quoted wrong. The article reaches a construction contract as General Business Law 756 defines it, meaning an aggregate project cost of $150,000 or more, and that definition excludes a one, two or three family residential dwelling, a residential tract development of one hundred or fewer one or two family dwellings, a project of four thousand five hundred square feet or less, and certain assisted residential projects under seventy-five units. Confirm you are inside the definition before you rely on the cap.
New Mexico. No retainage at all. Under NMSA 57-28-5(E), when making payments "an owner, contractor or subcontractor shall not retain, withhold, hold back or in any other manner not pay amounts owed for work performed."