Wisconsin notice to owner, free and word for word from 779.02(2)(b)

Sixty days from the front of the job

Read the trigger carefully, because it is not the trigger the rest of the lien world uses. The notice has to be served within 60 days after performing, furnishing, or procuring the first labor, services, materials, plans, or specifications. First, not last. A claim for lien under 779.06(1) is the one that counts 6 months back from your last day, and mixing the two up is the ordinary way a Wisconsin subcontractor loses a lien while believing there is time left.

Procuring is in the list alongside performing and furnishing, which matters if your involvement started with an order rather than with a truck. Placing the order for material destined for that improvement is an act the sentence names.

The practical habit is to serve it at the start rather than to calendar it. The notice costs an envelope, the deadline is measured from a date nobody records at the time, and there is no penalty anywhere in the section for serving early.

Two signed copies, to the last-known post-office address

The statute asks for a specific package: a written notice, in 2 signed copies, served on the owner or authorized agent at the last-known post-office address. Two copies is not a formality. The next sentence tells the owner or agent to provide a copy of the notice received, within 10 days after receipt, to any mortgage lender who is furnishing or is to furnish funds for construction of the improvement. Hand over one copy and the owner has nothing left to forward.

The notice's own last line says the same thing in your voice: please give your mortgage lender the extra copy of this notice within 10 days after you receive this, so your lender, too, will know that the undersigned is included in the job. The extra copy. The words only work if you sent two.

Last-known post-office address is the address standard, and it is forgiving by design. It does not ask you to find the owner, it asks you to use the address you have. Where there is more than one owner, 779.02(2)(e) says giving the notice required to any one owner or authorized agent is sufficient.

The two blanks, and why the statute's instructions are still printed beside them

The notice has exactly two blanks in it and the legislature wrote its own caption after each one. The first takes the date you first performed, furnished or procured, and the statute prints give date beside it. The second takes the property and the statute prints give legal description, street address or other clear description.

Those parentheticals are the statute's words, not a form publisher's, so they are still on this sheet. On other states' forms this site strips an instruction that a statute draws under a rule as a caption, because that is printing furniture. Wisconsin's sit inline in the sentence, which is a different thing: they are part of the prescribed language.

Read the second one as the permission it is. Legal description, street address or other clear description. A street address on its own satisfies the statute, and the descriptions people agonise over are optional. Put the address in, and add the parcel number or the platted lot if you have it to hand.

Paragraph (2)(b) asks for the notice with blanks accurately filled in, and paragraph (2)(e) is the safety net when a blank is wrong rather than empty: if the owner or lender complains of any insufficiency of any notice, the burden of proof is upon the owner or lender to show that he or she has been misled or deceived by the insufficiency. A small mistake is not automatically fatal, but the way not to test that is to get the two blanks right.

A late notice is not a dead notice, but it only covers what comes after

Subsection (3) does two things in three sentences. First it removes the lien from a claimant other than the prime contractor who fails to give the notice, on the land or improvement to which the failure relates. Then it gives something back: a claimant who serves a late but otherwise proper notice has the lien provided by s. 779.01 for anything performed, furnished or procured after the late notice is actually received by the owner.

Actually received, not mailed. That is a receipt standard rather than a dispatch standard, and it is the reason a late notice should go by a method that produces a date somebody else recorded.

The third sentence says who carries the argument: the burden of proving that labor, services, materials, plans or specifications for which a lien is claimed were furnished after that date is on the lien claimant. So a late notice turns your own daily paperwork into the evidence for your lien. The work before it is not recoverable by lien at all, which on a job that ran long can be most of the money.

None of that is a plan. It is what the statute leaves you when the 60 days were missed, and the honest reading is that it usually covers the tail of a job rather than the job.

Who does not have to give it

Subsection (1) lists the exceptions and says in the following cases only, so the list is the whole of it.

Paragraph (a) excuses any laborer or mechanic employed by any prime contractor or subcontractor. An employee is not a lien claimant giving notice, they are payroll.

Paragraph (b) excuses any lien claimant who has contracted directly with the owner, unless that claimant is a prime contractor subject to the notice requirement of sub. (2)(a). So a specialty contractor hired straight by the homeowner, with nobody under them, gives no notice at all.

Paragraph (c) is the one that decides the most jobs, and it is about the improvement rather than about you. No notice is required where more than 4 family living units are to be provided or added by the work of improvement if it is wholly residential in character, or in any case where the improvement is partly or wholly nonresidential in character. Commercial work is out, mixed use work is out, and anything over four residential units is out. What is left is small residential, which is where this form lives.

Paragraph (e) is the quiet one. A lien claimant other than a prime contractor is excused on a project on which the prime contractor is not required to give notice under this section. If the prime above you was excused, you are too, and the whole notice machinery sits out that job.

The signature block, and why the statute puts one there

The prescribed wording has no rule drawn under it for a name. It does not need one to require a signature, because the paragraph says what the package is in as many words: the person serves a written notice, in 2 signed copies. Signed copies. Then the notice itself opens its second sentence with the undersigned first performed, furnished, or procured, which has nothing to refer to unless somebody has signed under it.

So this sheet sets a company name, a signature, a title and a date under the prescribed paragraph. That is the site's rule for a statute that describes a signature in words instead of drawing a rule for it, and Wisconsin describes one twice.

The prime contractor notice on this site takes the opposite treatment for the opposite reason. Paragraph (2)(a) never uses the word signed, and its first home is inside a written contract the owner signs anyway, so that page explains the omission rather than drawing a line the legislature did not ask for.

What the owner is supposed to do next, and what the lender does

Two duties land the moment your envelope arrives. The owner or agent shall provide a copy of the notice received, within 10 days after receipt, to any mortgage lender who is furnishing or is to furnish funds for construction of the improvement to which the notice relates. That is why the second copy exists and why the last line of the notice asks for it in plain language.

Paragraph (2)(d) then puts the lender on the same hook from the other side. Every mortgage lender making an improvement or construction loan shall make reasonable inquiry of the owner as to whether any notices required by this subsection have been given, and a lender is not required to pay out any loan proceeds unless or until the prime contractor has given any notice required of the prime contractor.

Between them the two paragraphs are the reason this notice has teeth on a financed job. The construction lender is entitled to know who is on the job and what they are owed, and your notice is how that happens.

After the notice: 30 days of intent, 6 months to file, 2 years to sue

This notice preserves the right. It does not perfect anything, and three more dates sit behind it in 779.06.

First, 779.06(2): no lien claim may be filed or action brought on it unless, at least 30 days before timely filing of the lien claim, the lien claimant serves on the owner a written notice of intent to file a lien claim. The sentence after it is the one people miss, because it says the notice is required whether or not the claimant has been required to and has given a previous notice pursuant to s. 779.02. Serving this 60 day notice does not buy you out of that one. The statute says what the notice of intent must contain, briefly describe the nature of the claim, its amount and the land and improvement to which it relates, but it prescribes no language for it, which is why there is no form for it on this site.

Second, 779.06(1): no lien exists and no action to enforce one can be maintained unless, within 6 months from the date the claimant last performed, furnished or procured, a claim for the lien is filed in the office of the clerk of circuit court of the county in which the lands lie. Within 2 years from the date of filing, an action is brought and summons and complaint filed. And a copy of the claim for lien is served on the owner within 30 days after filing.

Third, 779.06(3) tells you what goes in the envelope with the claim: a copy of any notice given in compliance with s. 779.02, meaning this one, and a copy of the notice of intent under subsection (2). Keep this sheet and the proof of service in the job file, because six months later it becomes an attachment.

One more date worth knowing sits in 779.01(4). A lien under this subchapter is prior to any lien that originates after the visible commencement in place of the work of improvement, and for new construction that commencement is no earlier than the beginning of substantial excavation for the foundations, footings or base. That is what decides whether your lien sits in front of or behind the construction mortgage, and it is decided by the job, not by your paperwork.

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 Wisconsin statutory lien waiver forms, and conditional vs unconditional lien waiver for which of the two to sign.