Mechanic's Lien Deadlines & Notice Requirements in Mississippi
At a glance
| Governing law | Miss. Code Ann. §§ 85-7-401 to 85-7-433 (Title 85, Ch. 7, Art. 21), the Construction Lien Law, added by Laws 2014, ch. 487 (SB 2622), eff. 4/11/2014; replaced the pre-2014 scheme that gave a real-property lien only to a contractor or design professional in privity with the owner (former §§ 85-7-131 to 85-7-201, now narrowed to water, oil, and gas wells only) |
|---|---|
| Who can claim a lien | Contractors and subcontractors up to two tiers from the owner — a subcontractor of a subcontractor, but no further (§ 85-7-401(k)); materialmen only as far as a contractor or first-tier subcontractor (§ 85-7-401(g)); registered architects, professional engineers, and registered land surveyors (§ 85-7-403(1)); no lien for an unlicensed contractor or subcontractor, or for one who contracts with an unlicensed party (§ 85-7-403(5)); individual laborers are not a separate lien-holding category under this Act |
| Preliminary notice | No notice is required before work starts. A claimant without privity with the contractor (a second-tier subcontractor, or a materialman supplying a first-tier subcontractor) must notify the contractor, or the owner if there is none, within 30 days of first furnishing labor or materials or forfeit lien rights (§ 85-7-407(2)) — this does not apply to single-family residential construction (§ 85-7-407(4)). On single-family residential construction only, a claimant without privity with the OWNER must instead send a written pre-lien notice at least 10 days before filing, as a condition of having any lien right at all (§ 85-7-409(2)) |
| Deadline to file the lien | 90 days after the claimant's last work performed, or labor, services, or materials provided (the same count for every claimant tier), filed with the clerk of the chancery court of the county where the property is located (§ 85-7-405(1)(a)-(b)) |
| Notice of completion effect | None — Mississippi's Construction Lien Law has no owner-recorded notice of completion, cessation, or termination that shortens the 90-day lien-filing deadline; that clock always runs from the claimant's own last-furnished date. (A different device, the Notice of Contest of Lien, instead shortens the later foreclosure deadline — see below.) |
| Serving the lien on the owner | Within 2 business days after filing, the claimant must mail a true and accurate copy of the claim of lien to the owner by registered or certified mail or statutory overnight delivery; if the claimant isn't the contractor, a copy must also go to the contractor in the same 2 days (§ 85-7-405(1)(b)). The statute doesn't spell out a separate penalty for a late mailing, but omitting the lien's own required on-its-face expiration warning and right-to-contest notice invalidates the lien outright |
| Deadline to sue to foreclose | 180 days after the lien is filed to commence a payment action (a lawsuit, a bankruptcy proof of claim, or binding arbitration) and record a lis pendens, or the claim of lien becomes unenforceable (§§ 85-7-405(1)(c), 85-7-421(1)). An owner or contractor can shorten that window by recording a Notice of Contest of Lien; the lien is then extinguished unless a payment action follows within the earlier of 90 days after the contest notice or the original 180-day mark (§ 85-7-423) |
| Homestead/residential extras | Only 'single-family residential construction' — narrower than the Act's separately defined, 1-to-4-unit 'residential property' (§ 85-7-401(i)) — is exempt from the general-contractor subcontractor-list notice (§ 85-7-407(4)) and instead requires the 10-day pre-lien notice above, which doubles as a payment defense: payment the owner already made to the contractor or design professional is an absolute defense to a non-privity claimant's lien, up to the amount paid, unless that notice arrived before the payment (§ 85-7-409(1)-(2)) |
Requirements one by one
Governing law
Mississippi's private construction lien is governed by the Construction Lien Law, Miss. Code Ann. §§ 85-7-401 to 85-7-433 (Title 85, Chapter 7, Article 21), added by Laws 2014, ch. 487 (Senate Bill 2622), effective April 11, 2014. Before this Act, real property lien rights for building construction belonged only to a contractor or design professional in direct privity with the owner; subcontractors and materialmen had no property lien at all. The 2014 Act rewrote that scheme from the ground up and, in the same act, narrowed the state's older general lien article to cover only water, oil, and gas wells. That older article is still on the books, but its current text makes clear it no longer reaches ordinary building construction: § 85-7-131 today reads "every water well or oil and gas well ... shall be liable for services or construction and the debt shall be a lien thereon" — buildings are gone from its scope, and several of its former sections (§§ 85-7-135 to 85-7-139 and 85-7-149 to 85-7-151) were repealed outright by the same 2014 act.
Who can claim
Section 85-7-403(1) gives a lien to "all contractors, all subcontractors and all materialmen furnishing material for the improvement of real estate," plus registered architects, professional engineers, and registered land surveyors. But "subcontractor" has a narrow statutory meaning: § 85-7-401(k) defines it as a subcontractor "having privity of contract with the contractor," and also "subcontractors having privity of contract with a subcontractor having privity of contract with the contractor" — in practice, a lien reaches two tiers below the owner and no further. Materialmen are narrower still: § 85-7-401(g) limits "materialmen" to those furnishing materials "to a contractor or to a subcontractor in privity with the contractor," meaning a supplier to a second-tier subcontractor has no lien right at all. Licensing matters too: § 85-7-403(5) says "no lien shall exist in favor of any contractor or subcontractor who is not licensed as required," and that includes "or who contracts with any contractor or subcontractor who is not licensed as required" — so hiring an unlicensed party downstream can cost you your own lien.
Preliminary notice
No notice is owed before work begins. The 30-day notice in § 85-7-407(2) applies to "any person having a right to a lien pursuant to Section 85-7-403 who does not have privity of contract with the contractor" — that's a second-tier subcontractor or a materialman supplying a first-tier subcontractor. That notice must reach "the contractor, or, if there is no contractor, to the owner," within "thirty (30) days following the first delivery of labor, services or materials," and missing it means the claimant "shall thereby forfeit his right to a lien under this article." Section 85-7-407(4) exempts "single-family residential construction" from this notice entirely. In its place, single-family jobs carry a different notice: § 85-7-409(2) requires any claimant "not in privity with the owner" to give the owner "a pre-lien written notice at least ten (10) days before filing a claim of lien" — not a before-work notice, but a condition that must be satisfied before the lien itself can be filed.
Deadline to file the lien
Section 85-7-405(1)(b) requires filing "in the office of the clerk of the chancery court of the county where the property is located within ninety (90) days after the claimant's last work performed, labor, services or materials provided." That count is the same regardless of whether the claimant is the contractor, a subcontractor, or a design professional — Mississippi doesn't split the deadline by tier the way some states do.
Notice of completion effect
Mississippi's Construction Lien Law has no mechanism letting an owner record a notice of completion, cessation, or termination to shorten the 90-day filing deadline. Nothing in §§ 85-7-401 to 85-7-433 gives the owner that tool for the lien-filing clock; it runs strictly from the claimant's own last-furnished date regardless of what the owner does. The Act does give the owner a comparable tool for a later deadline instead — see "Deadline to sue to foreclose," below.
Serving the lien on the owner
Section 85-7-405(1)(b) requires that "no later than two (2) business days after the claim of lien is filed of record, the lien claimant shall send a true and accurate copy of the claim of lien by registered or certified mail or statutory overnight delivery to the owner of the property." If the claimant isn't the contractor, "he shall also send a copy of the claim of lien within two (2) business days" to the contractor. The statute doesn't attach an explicit separate penalty to missing just this mailing step. But a different requirement in the same subsection is fatal on its own: the lien must include the statutory expiration warning and a notice that "the owner has the right to contest the lien," and § 85-7-405(1)(b) says "the absence of the statement or notice shall invalidate the lien" — confirmed by § 85-7-421(1), which requires the expiration language "in at least 12 point bold font" and states that "failure to include the required language shall invalidate the lien and prevent it from being filed."
Deadline to sue to foreclose
Section 85-7-421(1) gives a claimant 180 days: "failure of a lien claimant to commence a payment action to collect the amount of his or her claim within one hundred eighty (180) days from the date of filing the lien renders the claim of lien unenforceable." A "payment action" isn't limited to a lawsuit — § 85-7-401(d) defines it as "a lawsuit, proof of claim in a bankruptcy case, or a binding arbitration." Section 85-7-405(1)(c) also requires a lis pendens notice filed with that action. An owner or contractor can shorten the window: § 85-7-423(1) lets either one record a "Notice of Contest of Lien," and once that happens, § 85-7-423(3) says the lien "shall be extinguished by law upon the earlier of ninety (90) days after the filing of the notice of contest of lien, or one hundred eighty (180) days from the date of lien filing" if no payment action follows.
Homestead/residential extras
Mississippi's residential carve-out is narrower than it first appears. The Act separately defines "residential property" in § 85-7-401(i) as "single-family and two-family, three-family, and four-family residential real estate" — a 1-to-4-unit definition. But the two residential-specific rules in this Act don't use that defined term; they apply only to "single-family residential construction." Section 85-7-407(4) exempts single-family jobs from the 30-day non-privity notice described above. Section 85-7-409(1) gives single-family owners a payment defense instead: payment already made "to a contractor or design professional in privity with the owner" is "an absolute defense to any claim of lien" by a subcontractor, materialman, engineer, or surveyor, but "only to the extent the owner has not received a pre-lien notice" first — the same 10-day notice required by § 85-7-409(2).
What trips people up
The two-tier privity ceiling is the biggest trap for anyone deep in a subcontracting chain: a third-tier subcontractor, or a supplier who sold to a second-tier subcontractor, has no lien right at all under § 85-7-401(g) and (k), no matter how carefully every notice step is followed — that claimant's only recourse is a breach-of-contract suit against whoever they contracted with. Second, don't assume the Act's defined "residential property" term (1 to 4 units, § 85-7-401(i)) controls the residential notice rules — it doesn't. Both the 30-day-notice exemption (§ 85-7-407(4)) and the 10-day pre-lien-notice/payment-defense pairing (§ 85-7-409) use the narrower phrase "single-family residential construction," so a duplex, triplex, or fourplex project gets neither carve-out and must follow the standard 30-day non-privity notice like a commercial job. Third, the lien's own required warning language is a strict formality: § 85-7-421(1) requires the 180-day expiration statement in "at least 12 point bold font," and leaving it off "shall invalidate the lien and prevent it from being filed" — a drafting slip that kills an otherwise-valid claim before it's even filed. Finally, § 85-7-403(5) makes licensing a shared risk: it strips lien rights not only from an unlicensed contractor or subcontractor but from anyone who contracts with one, so a licensed subcontractor can lose lien rights over a supplier's license lapse they had no way to verify.
Common questions
I supplied materials to a subcontractor who bought from another subcontractor. Do I have lien rights? No. Materialmen only reach as far as a contractor or a first-tier subcontractor (§ 85-7-401(g)); a supplier two tiers down the chain has no lien right under this Act.
The owner already paid the general contractor in full. Can I still get paid through a lien? Only outside single-family residential construction. On a single-family job, that payment is a full defense to your lien up to the amount paid, unless you sent the owner a 10-day pre-lien notice before the payment was made (§ 85-7-409(1)-(2)).
What happens if I miss the 90-day filing deadline? There's no grace period and no owner-side notice that extends it — the 90 days runs from your own last date of furnishing labor or materials (§ 85-7-405(1)(b)), and missing it simply forfeits the lien.
Statutes and sources
- Miss. Code Ann. § 85-7-131 (current scope of the former general lien article: water, oil, and gas wells only) — https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-85/chapter-7/article-9/section-85-7-131/ (accessed 2026-07-05)
- Miss. Code Ann. § 85-7-401 (definitions: materialman, residential property, subcontractor) — https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-85/chapter-7/article-21/section-85-7-401/ (accessed 2026-07-05)
- Miss. Code Ann. § 85-7-403 (who has a special lien; licensing prerequisite) — https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-85/chapter-7/article-21/section-85-7-403/ (accessed 2026-07-05)
- Miss. Code Ann. § 85-7-405 (creation and declaration of the lien; 90-day filing deadline; service on owner; 180-day payment action) — https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-85/chapter-7/article-21/section-85-7-405/ (accessed 2026-07-05)
- Miss. Code Ann. § 85-7-407 (30-day non-privity notice; single-family exemption) — https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-85/chapter-7/article-21/section-85-7-407/ (accessed 2026-07-05)
- Miss. Code Ann. § 85-7-409 (single-family residential payment defense and 10-day pre-lien notice) — https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-85/chapter-7/article-21/section-85-7-409/ (accessed 2026-07-05)
- Miss. Code Ann. § 85-7-421 (180-day expiration of the lien; required on-face warning language) — https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-85/chapter-7/article-21/section-85-7-421/ (accessed 2026-07-05)
- Miss. Code Ann. § 85-7-423 (Notice of Contest of Lien shortens the foreclosure deadline) — https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-85/chapter-7/article-21/section-85-7-423/ (accessed 2026-07-05)
Source links
Every statute quoted above, linked, with the date we checked it.
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