Florida's New 45-Day Payment Rule for Private Construction Starts July 1

Picture this: a subcontractor finishes the drywall in March. The general contractor gets paid by the owner in April. The sub's invoice sits unpaid all summer. Until now, Florida law had strict payment deadlines for public projects, but on private jobs, payment timing was mostly whatever the contract said.

That changes July 1, 2026. A new law — Florida Statutes § 489.1295, created by SB 290 and signed by Governor DeSantis — puts a payment clock on licensed contractors for private construction work.

The rule is simple

Once a licensed contractor gets paid, it has 45 days to pay its subcontractors and suppliers for that work. If the subcontract sets its own payment schedule, that schedule controls instead. If the contract says nothing, the 45-day deadline applies.

The law covers private construction projects only. Public and government projects stay under the separate prompt-payment rules that already exist.

The big exception — and the hole in it

A contractor can hold payment if there is a "bona fide dispute" over the amount owed. In plain terms: a genuine, good-faith disagreement about the bill.

The problem? The law never says what counts as genuine. There's no requirement to put the dispute in writing, no deadline to raise it, no notice rule. Until regulators or courts fill in that blank, "bona fide dispute" is where every fight under this law will happen. Expect contracts to start spelling out what a dispute is and requiring written notice.

Break the rule, risk your license

A contractor who knowingly or willfully breaks this rule faces discipline from the Construction Industry Licensing Board (CILB) — the state board that already punishes contractors for things like abandoning jobs and mismanaging money.

That detail matters. Discipline records are public and attached to the contractor's license number, right alongside everything else in that contractor's file.

Why lawyers and claims professionals should care

Two reasons.

First, think about the excuse a contractor is most likely to use for not paying: "the work was defective." That's really a construction-defect claim — showing up in a payment fight, outside the normal legal process, sometimes years before any homeowner complains about the same project. Payment disputes like that are early warning signs of which builder-and-trade relationships were already going bad over workmanship.

Second, the paper trail. Once these violations start turning into CILB cases, a contractor's payment history becomes part of its public license record. That's exactly the kind of public record DAIS already tracks about builders and contractors, via our methodology. A new law rarely creates a new dataset overnight — it gives the existing one a new reason to grow.