Mechanics lien in Texas: notices and deadlines

Who can claim a Texas lien

Texas splits every claimant into two kinds. An original contractor is anyone who contracts with the owner, directly or through the owner's agent. Everyone below it is a derivative claimant: the subcontractor of any tier, and the supplier who sells to the original contractor or to a sub. Labor, material, specially fabricated material that was never delivered, design work by a licensed architect, engineer or surveyor, landscaping and demolition all carry lien rights (§ 53.021).

The split decides everything that follows. The original contractor owes no monthly notice and files on its own completion date. A derivative claimant owes the owner a notice for every unpaid month, and its lien is capped at the earned share of its subcontract minus what it has already been paid (§ 53.024). One escape hatch: if the “general” you signed with is controlled by the owner and was put there to dodge the notice rules, you are treated as an original contractor (§ 53.026).

The monthly notice of claim

Texas has no start-of-job preliminary notice. Its clock starts when a month goes unpaid. For every month of labor or material you have not been paid for, send a notice of claim to the owner (or reputed owner) and the original contractor by the 15th day of the third month after the month you did the work. On a residential project it is the 15th day of the second month. Miss it and the lien for that month is gone, even if later months are still alive.

The notice has a statutory form, and the safest notice is the form itself with the blanks filled in. You may attach the invoice or billing statement. Send it in person, by certified mail, or by a traceable private carrier that confirms receipt; certified mail counts as given the day you deposit it (§ 53.003). If the 15th lands on a Saturday, Sunday or legal holiday, the deadline moves to the next business day (§ 53.003(e)) — but mail it a week early and you never need that rule.

Why the owner cares: once it receives your notice it may hold back enough from the original contractor to cover your claim (§ 53.081), and money it keeps paying out after that can come back on its property if your lien is perfected and reduced to judgment (§ 53.084). That is the pressure the notice buys. A separate past-due notice to the original contractor alone is allowed but optional (§ 53.056(a-4)).

A worked timeline

An HVAC subcontractor signs with the general contractor on an office build-out in Austin: a $148,000.00 subcontract with 5 percent retainage. It works March through June 2026 and finishes its last ductwork on Friday, June 26, which completes its subcontract. March and April are paid. The May pay application ($26,600.00 net) and the June one ($19,000.00) never are, and $7,400.00 of retainage is still held. The general finishes its own contract on Friday, September 18. Every date below is counted from the statute.

Red marks a deadline. Each unpaid month runs its own clock.

How we would run it: mail each notice the week a pay application goes 30 days unpaid, not in the week it is due. Then file one affidavit covering May, June and the retainage on Friday, October 9, which beats both the October 15 affidavit date and the October 19 reserve date, and get the copies out by Wednesday, October 14. That puts the whole $53,000.00 on the record with room to spare, and the one date left to diarise is October 15, 2027.

Filing the lien affidavit

A Texas lien is perfected by filing a sworn affidavit with the county clerk in the county where the improvements are located (§ 53.052(e)). The deadline is the 15th day of a later month, counted from a month, not from a day, so work finished on the 1st and on the 30th of the same month gets the same date.

The affidavit is signed by you or someone on your behalf and must contain, substantially, the eight items below (§ 53.054). It does not need line items; trade abbreviations are fine. You may attach the contract and copies of each notice you sent, and on a disputed claim you should.

The mechanics lien form builder lays out those eight items so nothing is left blank; check the result against the county clerk's own recording requirements before you file. Texas does not require a notice of intent before the affidavit, because the notice of claim already warned the owner. A short demand to the general a few weeks before your filing date still settles plenty of claims, and the notice of intent to lien generator drafts one. For the steps that are the same in every state, see how to file a mechanics lien.

Retainage and the owner's 10% reserve

Texas makes the owner hold money back whether the contract says so or not. During the work and for 30 days after completion, the owner must reserve 10 percent of the contract price, or 10 percent of the value of the work done (§ 53.101). That reserve is the pot a derivative claimant reaches with a timely affidavit, and an owner who skips it leaves its property open to a lien at least for the amount it should have kept (§ 53.105).

Watch the county records for an owner's affidavit of completion. It is prima facie evidence of the completion date, it must be sent to every claimant who gave a notice, and if it is filed more than 10 days after completion the filing date becomes the completion date (§ 53.106). Our retainage laws by state guide puts the Texas reserve next to other states' release rules.

Residential jobs and homesteads

A residential construction project is work on a residence: a single-family house, duplex, triplex or quadruplex, or a condo or co-op unit, owned by an adult and lived in (or meant to be) by one of the owners (§ 53.001(8)-(10)). Every derivative clock runs a month shorter there. If the house is also the owner's homestead, four more conditions sit on top (§ 53.254):

The suit deadline

A filed affidavit is security, not payment. To turn it into money you sue to foreclose, and that suit must be on file no later than the first anniversary of the last day you could have filed the affidavit (§ 53.158(a)). The year runs from your deadline, not from the day you actually filed, so filing early buys no extra time. Before the year runs out you and the record owner can sign a written extension, recorded in the same county, that pushes it to no later than the second anniversary of your filing date (§ 53.158(a-2)).

Expect paper to be attacked first. In any suit over the lien, the owner or the general can file a verified summary motion to remove it on a short list of grounds: late notice, an affidavit that misses § 53.054 or § 53.052, a missing copy under § 53.055, or a homestead defect (§ 53.160). Each is a paperwork failure, which is why the mail receipts matter as much as the invoice. Fees are awarded as equitable and just in either direction (§ 53.156).

What changed in 2022

House Bill 2237 rewrote chapter 53 effective January 1, 2022. It applies only to an original contract entered into on or after that date; a job whose prime contract was signed earlier still runs on the old rules (H.B. 2237 §§ 37-38). A lot of Texas lien advice online was written for the old system. If a guide predates 2022, or does not quote the statutory notice form, treat its deadlines as suspect and check them against the current chapter.

Texas statutory lien waivers

Texas prints its lien waivers in the statute. A waiver and release is unenforceable unless it substantially complies with one of four forms, is signed by you or your agent, and, for a conditional release, there is evidence you were paid (§§ 53.281, 53.284). Nobody may make you sign an unconditional waiver for money you have not received (§ 53.283), and the two unconditional forms carry a bold warning at the top, no smaller than 10-point.

Two things to check before you sign. The progress forms carve out “unpaid retention, pending modifications and changes, or other items furnished”, so do not let anyone strike that line. And on a single-family house, townhouse or duplex, a waiver written into the contract before work starts can bind a sub that supplies labor, though not one that only supplies material (§ 53.282). Read the subcontract, not just the waiver.

The Texas lien waiver generator fills in the statutory text for all four forms. If you are deciding which one to hand over, the conditional vs unconditional comparison covers the trade-off.