Anyone who has worked on a Florida public construction project knows the Little Miller Act calendar by heart. Under Florida Statute § 255.05, the prime contractor on a public job over $100,000 must arrange a payment bond. Subcontractors not in direct contract with the prime must serve a Notice to Contractor before beginning work or within 45 days of starting. Any claimant must then serve a Notice of Nonpayment on the contractor and surety within 90 days of last work. Suit must be filed within one year, but not sooner than 90 days after last work. Miss any of those windows and the bond claim is gone.
What is newer in 2026 is how visible those deadlines have become inside the audit of a Florida contractor — not because the statute changed, but because of how lender and surety underwriting is now reading the audited financial statements.
Why the audit picks this up
When a contractor’s financial statements include receivables tied to public projects, the recoverability of those receivables depends on the contractor having preserved its bond rights. A six-figure receivable from a public-project sub becomes much less recoverable if the audit cannot verify that a Notice of Nonpayment was timely served. The result is that audit fieldwork is now spending real time on notice logs, certified-mail receipts, sworn statements of account, and bond claim file copies in a way it did not five years ago.
The companion document is the Contractor’s Final Payment Affidavit. Required at least five days before initiating a foreclosure suit on a private-project mechanics lien, the CFA is a sworn statement listing unpaid amounts owed to subcontractors and suppliers. When a contractor’s audited balance sheet shows meaningful accounts payable to subs, auditors increasingly want to see whether the CFA process has been maintained, because it speaks directly to the completeness and accuracy of those payables.
“The Little Miller Act deadlines used to be a back-office concern. They’ve moved to the front of the audit because they affect whether the numbers on the balance sheet hold up.”
Where contractors most often run into trouble
Three patterns are showing up in 2026 audit findings. First, the 45-day Notice to Contractor is the deadline most commonly missed. Sub-subs and remote-tier suppliers sometimes assume that their direct customer relationship protects them and discover too late that it does not. Second, Notice of Nonpayment service by ordinary mail or email is increasingly being treated by auditors as insufficient documentation — certified mail with return receipt, or the equivalent statutory service method, is what supports the receivable. Third, the Notice of Contest of Claim Against Payment Bond — a 60-day shot clock the contractor or surety can fire at a claimant — means contractors with outstanding bond claims need a documented monitoring process the audit can review.
None of this is new law. What is new is that the audited financial statement is now where these procedural compliance issues become visible to the lender, the surety, and the bonding capacity that follows.
