Massachusetts design professional's notice of contract

Who counts as a design professional

Section 2A defines the term for the whole chapter: an architect, landscape architect, professional engineer, licensed site professional or land surveyor who is licensed or registered as such in the commonwealth, and any corporation, partnership, limited liability company or other legal entity that is authorized under the laws of the commonwealth to practice or hold itself out as practicing any of those professions.

Two things follow from that. The license has to be a Massachusetts license or registration, and the firm counts as well as the individual, so a professional corporation or an LLC files in its own name.

Professional services is also defined in section 2A, and the definition is broad: services customarily and legally performed by or under the supervision or responsible control of design professionals in the course of their professional practice, including without limitation programming, planning, surveying, site investigation, analysis, assessment, design, preparation of drawings and specifications, and construction administration services. Construction administration is named in the statute, so time spent running the job after the drawings were issued is inside the lien rather than outside it.

The lien exists before the building does

This is the part of section 2C with no equivalent anywhere else in chapter 254. The notice may be filed or recorded at any time after the execution of the written contract whether or not the professional services have been commenced or completed, and whether or not the work to which those services relate has been, or is ever, commenced or completed.

Read the words or is ever. A feasibility study for a scheme that was shelved, a set of permit drawings for a building that was never funded, a survey for a subdivision that never happened: the statute says the lien is available on all of it, because the design professional's contract is with the owner and the land is still there whatever happened to the project.

That makes the recording decision different from a contractor's. A contractor waits to see whether an invoice gets paid. A design professional on a scheme that is going quiet has an instrument available on the day the contract was signed.

The deadline, and the thirty days after it that catch people

The outer limit is the earlier of sixty days after a notice of substantial completion is filed or recorded under section 2A, or ninety days after the design professional, or anyone claiming by, through or under him, last performed professional services. Only two dates here. Section 2B's notice of termination does not appear in section 2C at all.

Then section 8, and this is the sentence design professionals miss. Liens under sections 2C and 2D shall be dissolved unless a like statement is filed or recorded at the appropriate registry of deeds within thirty days after the last day that a notice of contract may be filed or recorded under the applicable section.

That clock does not run from the day you record. It runs from the last day you could have recorded. Record early and you do not buy yourself more time for the statement of account, you simply have longer to wait before a shorter deadline lands. Work out the outer limit under section 2C first, then add thirty days, and that is the date the statement of account is due whatever day you actually filed.

After the statement comes section 11: the lien is dissolved unless a civil action to enforce it is commenced within ninety days after the filing of that statement. Section 11 also carries the inaccuracy rule, and it names professional services in terms, so an honest error in stating the amount due does not sink the lien unless it is shown the filer wilfully and knowingly claimed more than was due.

What goes on the form

Four answers and no figures. The date of the written contract, the owner, your own firm as the design professional, and the description of the property.

There is no amount on this form. Section 2C secures the payment of all amounts due or to become due to the design professional under the contract, and it does not ask the notice to state a number. The number comes later, in the statement of account under section 8.

The order of the parties on the form is owner first, then design professional, which is the same order the section 2 notice of contract uses and the opposite of the section 4 one. The sheet below follows the statute.

The description prompt is printed in capitals, INSERT DESCRIPTION, and the sheet keeps it that way. Give the street address, the town, the county and the book and page of the deed if you have it. On a scheme that was never built there may be no street address yet, in which case the deed reference is doing all the work and is worth paying a few dollars at the registry to get right.

Where the words came from

The form is sliced out of the text of M.G.L. c. 254, s. 2C as published at codes.findlaw.com, current as of 1 January 2025. Nothing is retyped and nothing is paraphrased.

It is keyed word for word against the same section at malegislature.gov, the state's own publisher. All sixty two words of the form appear in both, in the same order.

The two editions typeset the blanks differently. findlaw prints underscore runs and the state's page prints bare space, so on the state's copy the first sentence reads dated , between , owner, and , design professional. That is typesetting rather than text, and the comparison was done on the words for exactly that reason. findlaw is the build source because it is the edition that shows you where the answers go. The capture is tools/ma2xcap.py.

Questions people ask

Once the job is running and you are getting paid on it, the paperwork that comes next is the waiver: see the Massachusetts statutory lien waiver forms, and conditional vs unconditional lien waiver for which of the two to sign.