Getting paid in Québec: notice of contract, legal hypothec and releases — the calendar not to miss

When to declare your contract, the 30 days to register the legal hypothec, the 6 months to preserve it, and what holdbacks and releases are really worth.

A contractor who is not paid rarely loses their money in front of a judge. They lose it in a calendar — that of the construction legal hypothec, which runs on its own, without notice, and which extinguishes a perfectly valid claim because a date has passed. Thirty days here, six months there, and a written notice that had to go out before the first hammer blow.

This guide lays that calendar flat: who must declare their contract and when, what must be registered in the land register within thirty days of the end of the work, what must follow within six months, how holdbacks and releases really work in Québec — and what the new prompt-payment regime changes, having just extended to medium-sized public contracts.

The calendar at a glance

Step zero: the declaration of contract

The construction legal hypothec benefits, under article 2726 of the Civil Code, the architect, the engineer, the supplier of materials, the worker, the contractor and the subcontractor. But article 2728 sets a condition for those who did not contract directly with the owner — so for every subcontractor and every supplier: they must declare their contract in writing to the owner of the immovable. Only the worker is exempt.

The consequence is brutal and often misunderstood: the hypothec only secures what was supplied after the notice. A subcontractor who declares their contract the day they send their formal notice has nothing left to secure — the work is behind them. The declaration is a start-of-job gesture, not an end-of-job one.

What the notice must contain

• The nature of the contract you concluded and with whom you concluded it (the general contractor, most often);
• The price agreed, or an assessment of the value of the work or materials;
• The description of the immovable concerned, as precise as possible;
• Your intention to avail yourself of the legal hypothec if you are not paid.

The thirty days: registering the notice of legal hypothec

Article 2727 sets out the mechanics. Your hypothec already exists, without any formality, during the thirty days following the end of the work. For it to survive that period, you must, before it expires, register in the land register a notice describing the immovable and stating the amount of the claim. That notice must also be served on the owner — in practice, by bailiff.

When those thirty days begin

"End of the work" does not mean "end of my own work". Within the meaning of article 2110, the work is completed when it has been carried out and is fit for use for its intended purpose — correcting minor deficiencies does not push that date back, and a professional certificate does not necessarily set it. Since the question gets litigated, the only prudent conduct is to count from the day you finished: you register earlier, therefore never too late.

What the hypothec secures is not your invoice, but the added value brought to the immovable by your work or materials. A contract balance, a holdback and essential costs are normally part of it; work that added nothing to the value of the immovable is not.

The six months: the step almost everyone forgets

Registering the notice is not enough. The hypothec is extinguished six months after the end of the work unless, within that period, you have published an action against the owner or registered a prior notice of exercise of a hypothecary right. Many contractors register their notice correctly, start a negotiation that drags on, and discover in the seventh month that their security evaporated while they were talking.

Past that point, not everything is lost — there remains the personal claim against the party you contracted with, subject to the three-year prescription, and recourse to the performance or payment bond where one exists. But you lose what made the hypothec strong: a right on the immovable, which blocks a sale or a refinancing and suddenly makes the conversation very concrete.

Holdbacks and releases: what the law really imposes

It is the most widespread source of confusion, especially among contractors who have worked elsewhere in Canada. Québec imposes no statutory holdback on private job sites. In Ontario, a 10% holdback applies by default; here, the 5% to 10% holdback you know is contractual — it exists because your contract says so, and it is released according to what your contract provides.

Two provisions of the Civil Code are added to the contract, and they play in opposite directions depending on which side of the table you sit on:

• Article 2111 — the client may hold back, at acceptance, an amount sufficient to have the apparent poor workmanship corrected.
• Article 2123 — at the time of payment, the client may hold back an amount sufficient to pay the claims of the workers and of those who declared their contract to them. That holdback stands as long as the contractor has not handed over a release of those claims; it falls if the contractor provides sufficient security.

What changes in 2026: prompt payment for public contracts

The Regulation respecting prompt payment and prompt dispute resolution for construction work has been in force since September 8, 2025. It applies only to public contracts — a private residential job site is not covered — but its progressive rollout brings a growing number of businesses into a regime where payment deadlines stop being negotiable.

The regime rests on a cascading payment calendar: the public body pays at the latest on the last day of the month; the general contractor pays its subcontractors on the fifth day of the second month following their request; the subcontractor pays its own on the tenth day, and each lower level has five more days. A refusal to pay must be signified by a reasoned notice within the prescribed period — failing which, the payment request is deemed valid.

In case of a dispute, an adjudicator decides in about fifty days, with a possible extension. Their decision binds the parties and must be executed, without being final: the ordinary civil recourse remains. It is a reversal of logic — silence no longer protects the one who does not pay.

An example, end to end

Fictional figures, real sequence. An excavation contractor signs a $46,000 subcontract with a general contractor for a new residence. They do not know the owner.

• Before mobilizing — they send the owner a declaration by bailiff: nature of the contract, name of the general contractor, price of $46,000, description of the lot, intention to avail themselves of the legal hypothec. Cost: a few tens of dollars.
• Their work ends on May 12, but the job site continues. They invoice, follow up, get promises.
• On June 8 — twenty-seven days after the end of their work — they have the notice of legal hypothec registered and served on the owner. They do not wait to find out when the whole project will be completed: they count from their own end of work.
• The balance remains unpaid. On November 2, before the six-month deadline, they register a prior notice of exercise. The discussion, polite until then, settles in three weeks: the immovable was about to be refinanced.

Without the initial declaration, that subcontractor had no hypothec to register. Without the November prior notice, their June registration became ineffective on November 12.

What BatiCore does for you

BatiCore does not draft your deeds — the declaration, the registration and the prior notice remain legal acts, often carried out by a bailiff or a notary. What the tool does is keep you from missing the date. Every project carries its declarations and its releases with their deadlines, the Payment protection tab shows who declared what and what remains to be released, and the schedule surfaces the dates that are approaching instead of letting them sleep in a binder. Holdbacks are tracked per invoice and per project, and each subcontractor's file says whether their compliance is up to date before you pay them. For the mechanics of holdbacks at invoicing, see Construction estimate template for Québec.

The BatiCore team

We build BatiCore, management software for Québec construction contractors — estimates, job sites, CCQ payroll, compliance. Our articles cite dated public sources; when a fact comes from a regulator or a competitor, we say which one and when. Spotted an error? Write to us, we fix it.