You wait 51 days to get paid. Your AP is due in 30.
As a sub, your lien rights usually depend on a preliminary notice sent within days of first furnishing — before anyone is even worried about payment. Miss it, and the leverage is gone months before you need it.
Sound familiar?
The two-month float is yours to carry
Subs wait an average of 51 days after submitting a pay app. GCs believe payment goes out in 35 (Billd, 2026). That gap is two months of fronted labor and materials on every job, and 64% of subs report being slow-paid by their GC. You're not imagining it.
The gap comes out of your pocket
81% of subs carry supplier terms shorter than the time it takes to get paid, and one in three has pulled from personal or retirement savings to cover it (Billd, 2025). 78% take no regular profit draws. Somewhere along the way, you became the cheapest lender on the project.
No contract with the owner. No room for a missed notice.
Your lien rights usually depend on a preliminary notice sent within days of first furnishing, before anyone is even worried about payment. The window is 20 days in Arizona and California, 8 working days in Oregon, and it changes at every state line. Miss it on one busy week and the right to recover on that job is gone. No grace periods.
What Lienlink does about it.
- Preliminary notices fire from job start data automatically. No calendar math, no memory, no missed windows.
- Every state you work in, every clock tracked, each deadline traced to the statute that sets it.
- When pay stalls, the lien files on time without a $2,000 attorney bill. You already hold the paper before you ever need it.
One saved receivable can equal a month of payroll. That's why the first job Lienlink protects usually pays for years of the ones after it.
Get your lien rights handled.
Protect thousands in receivables and stop tracking deadlines by hand, with a paper trail that holds up.
If a Lienlink error costs you a lien right, we pay the full job value under our guarantee Tracking is free. Pay only when we mail
