Preliminary notice: the deadline that decides whether you can lien at all

A preliminary notice is the document a contractor, subcontractor or supplier sends near the start of its work on a construction project, telling the owner, the lender and the party above that it is furnishing labour or materials. In Florida the same instrument is called a notice to owner; California calls it a preliminary notice and ties it to a twenty-day window; other states use other names and other deadlines.

Its function is easy to misunderstand from the tone of it. It is not a demand and it does not mean anything has gone wrong. It preserves the right to file a mechanics lien later if payment fails — and in the states that require it, a party who did not send one has no lien right at all, regardless of how strong the underlying claim is.

What a preliminary notice does

• Tells the owner who is on their project below the level they contracted with — which is the policy reason the requirement exists.
• Preserves lien rights, and in many states bond claim rights on public work, for the party sending it.
• Starts the clock the state prescribes, usually measured from first furnishing labour or materials rather than from the contract date.
• Frequently has to reach several parties: owner, general contractor, lender, and sometimes the surety.
• Requires proof of service — certified mail, a return receipt, or another method the state accepts — which is the part people skip and the part disputes turn on.

Send it on every job, as routine

Contractors hesitate because a notice looks adversarial to a client at the start of a relationship. The professional answer is to send one on every project as standard practice, and to say so: sending it selectively is what makes it a signal, while sending it always makes it administrative. Everyone experienced in the industry receives these constantly and reads nothing into them; the parties who react are usually the ones who were going to be a payment problem anyway.

The deadline usually runs from first furnishing on that project, not from signing the contract and not from the first invoice. Where the start date is ambiguous — mobilisation, a survey visit, materials delivered to a yard — take the earliest defensible date and count from there.

The dates that follow

The preliminary notice is the first of a sequence, and each subsequent step has its own deadline: a notice of intent to lien in some states, then the lien filing itself within a period after last furnishing or completion, then a deadline to enforce the lien by suit, after which it expires whether or not it was recorded. Those windows are short — measured in weeks and months, not years — and they are jurisdictional, meaning a missed date cannot be cured by good faith. Build the whole schedule per project at the start rather than discovering the next date when the previous one has passed.

Keeping the proof

What matters later is not that you sent it but that you can prove what was sent, to whom, and when. Ettex Records holds the notice, the address list and the proof of service per project with the downstream deadlines visible, Ettex Sheets carries the deadline schedule across projects so the next date is always in front of somebody, and the document exchanged at the other end of the payment cycle is the lien waiver, which pairs with the certified payroll file on public work.

To be clear: this is records and scheduling, not legal advice. Who must send a preliminary notice, to whom, within how many days and by what service method is state law and differs substantially — including for public versus private work. Specialist services exist that prepare and serve these across states, and on a business doing multi-state work they are worth the cost.