Kentucky Lien Waiver & Release — KRS 371.405 Voids Advance Waivers, but KRS 371.425 Excludes Residential Work Entirely (2026)
✓ Verified against Kentucky statutes · Reviewed September 2026 · By Michael Evan — Founder · 50 states · 799 rules
Kentucky mechanics lien deadlines at a glance
Preliminary Notice
75-120 days — Intent to file notice
Mechanics Lien
6 months — From last date of furnishing
Enforcement
1 year — From filing
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The Rule Is in the Contracts Chapter, Not the Lien Chapter
A lien waiver and release is the document a contractor, subcontractor, or supplier signs to give up lien rights, ordinarily in exchange for payment. States regulate that document along two axes — form , meaning what it must say and look like, and timing , meaning when it may validly be given. Texas regulates form hard, prescribing four statutory templates a waiver must substantially comply with. Kentucky prescribes nothing at all. KRS Chapter 376 , the mechanics’ and materialman’s lien chapter, contains no waiver template, no required language, no notarization requirement, and no recording requirement. Any writing that clearly expresses an intention to release lien rights can do so. Kentucky’s timing rule exists, but it is not where a contractor would look for it. It sits in KRS 371.400 to 371.425 , the Kentucky Fairness in Construction Act , enacted in 2007 and located in the contracts title rather than the property title. A claimant who reads the entire lien chapter looking for the rule that governs waivers will finish the chapter without finding it, because the provision that decides whether the document in front of it means anything is filed under contracts. KRS 371.405 is the operative section. Among the provisions it declares void and unenforceable in a construction contract is one “that purports to waive, release, or extinguish rights provided by…
The Residential Exclusion Is the Whole Story
Twenty lines past the operative rule, KRS 371.425 sets the Act’s reach: KRS 371.400 to 371.425 “shall apply to public construction and public works projects, and to private construction, excluding residential construction.” The Act also excludes contracts entered into by a borrower of funds provided, insured, or guaranteed by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service, and any contract for construction of or relating to a facility as defined in KRS Chapter 278. It reaches only agreements entered into after June 26, 2007 . The residential exclusion is the one that changes outcomes. Two Kentucky subcontractors can sign the identical no-lien clause on the same afternoon in the same city — one on an office fit-out, one on a subdivision — and the clause is void for the first and enforceable against the second. Nothing in KRS Chapter 376 fills the gap; the lien chapter has no anti-waiver provision of its own. On Kentucky residential work, an advance waiver is an ordinary contract term interpreted under ordinary contract principles. And there is a second problem stacked on the first. KRS 371.400 never defines “residential construction.” It defines construction as the process of building, altering, repairing, improving, or demolishing structures or buildings. It defines contracting entity , contractor , and subcontractor .…
Kentucky Protects the Progress Waiver That Connecticut Voids
The exception in KRS 371.405 is worth reading closely, because it points the opposite direction from the anti-waiver rules in several other states. Kentucky expressly permits “partial waivers of lien rights provided by the contractor or subcontractor for progress payments.” The routine monthly draw waiver — the document exchanged at every pay application for the life of a job — is not merely tolerated in Kentucky. It is carved out by name. Compare Connecticut , where Conn. Gen. Stat. § 42-158l voids “any periodic lien waiver issued pursuant to a construction contract” to the extent it releases work not yet performed and paid for. Connecticut names the periodic waiver in order to reach it; Kentucky names it in order to protect it. The same monthly form, on the same kind of job, sits inside a statutory safe harbor in Louisville and inside a statutory prohibition in Hartford. That is why a national credit department cannot run one waiver policy across a fifty-state book of business, and why New York ’s public-policy rule under Lien Law § 34 and Indiana ’s no-lien regime produce different answers again. Two words limit the Kentucky carve-out, and both do real work. The waiver must be partial , and it must be given for progress payments . A form captioned “Partial Waiver” that releases all claims through final completion is total in…
What Else KRS 371.405 Kills — and the Clocks It Starts
The lien waiver provision is one of three prohibitions in the section. On covered work, KRS 371.405 also voids a provision waiving a party’s right to resolve disputes through litigation, and a provision waiving damages for delay. The section includes a severability rule: where a provision is found null and unenforceable, that provision does not affect the balance of the contract, and the contract’s provisions are severable. A void no-lien clause therefore does not blow up the subcontract around it. The same section sets Kentucky’s prompt payment clocks, and the unit of measurement matters. Undisputed amounts owed are due from the contracting entity to the contractor within thirty business days after receipt of a payment request, and the contractor pays its subcontractors within fifteen business days of receiving payment from the owner. Business days, not calendar days — a distinction worth roughly two extra weeks on the first clock and one on the second, and one that regularly gets flattened in fifty-state summaries. KRS 371.410 governs retainage, which is the balance most often swept into a broadly worded waiver by accident because it is earned but unpaid. Until fifty percent of the project is complete, no more than ten percent retainage may be withheld; once fifty-one percent is complete, retainage may not exceed five percent of the total contract amount.…
How Kentucky Waiver Law Applies, Scenario by Scenario
The pattern to take from the table is that Kentucky’s answer depends first on the project type and only second on the document. Compare Iowa , which has no waiver statute of any kind — its lien chapter runs thirty-four sections without addressing waiver once, so the same analysis there is pure contract law from the first question. Our lien waiver hub tracks where each state falls.
The Deadlines the Waiver Sits Inside
A void waiver preserves a right. It does not preserve the deadline for exercising it, and Kentucky’s sequence contains a trap that dissolves liens outright. Under KRS 376.010 , a claimant with no direct contract with the owner must give the owner written notice of the intention to hold the property liable — within 75 days of last furnishing if the claim is under $1,000, and within 120 days if the claim is over $1,000. The applicable window depends on the claim amount, so the deadline is not knowable until the claim is quantified. The lien statement is then filed with the county clerk of the county where the property is located, within six months of the last day labor or materials were furnished, under KRS 376.080 . The statement must be subscribed and sworn to, and must state the amount claimed, a description of the property sufficient to identify it, the owner’s name if known, and the name of the person by whom the claimant was employed or to whom materials were furnished. Then comes the step that ends Kentucky claims: a copy of the lien statement must be sent by regular mail to the owner at the owner’s last known address within seven days of filing , and failing to do so dissolves the lien . Suit to enforce must be brought within twelve months of filing the lien statement under KRS 376.090 , or the lien is dissolved. Confirm the record owner and the…
What Makes a Kentucky Waiver Hold Up
Because Kentucky imposes no form requirement, the drafting burden falls entirely on the claimant, and because the Act’s protection may not apply at all, the sequence matters more here than in states with a universal anti-waiver rule. A defensible Kentucky release states the payment amount actually received, the through date it covers, and express carve-outs for retainage, pending change orders, unbilled extras, and disputed items — and it is signed after the funds have cleared rather than in exchange for the promise of them.
Generating and Tracking Kentucky Waivers
The Mechanics Lien Management Method treats a Kentucky waiver as a dated event in a payment record rather than a standalone form, because the questions that decide its effect — was this partial, was it given for a specific progress payment, and is this project residential — are answered by the project file rather than by the document’s caption. The document tool records the payment amount and clearing date, prints the through date on the face of the release, and carries retainage and open change order figures into express carve-outs instead of leaving them inside a blanket release. Kentucky Waiver & Lien Statement Generator Produce a Kentucky partial waiver with the payment amount, through date, and retainage carve-out populated from the project record — and generate the KRS 376.080 lien statement for the correct county clerk. The Mechanics Lien Management State System calendars the 75/120-day owner notice, the six-month filing window, the seven-day owner mailing, and the twelve-month enforcement date from your own furnishing dates. Pair it with the Preliminary Notice hub for the KRS 376.010 owner notice, the Kentucky statute library for the full citation set, and the bond claim guide for public projects, where no lien attaches to public property and the payment bond is the remedy.
Generate the Right Kentucky Documents in Minutes
The Mechanics Lien Management lien generator produces a Kentucky partial waiver with the payment amount, through date, and retainage carve-out on its face, plus the KRS 376.080 lien statement for the correct county clerk — and the Mechanics Lien Management deadline calculator tracks the 75/120-day owner notice, the six-month filing window, and the seven-day mailing that dissolves the lien if it is missed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Kentucky have a statutory lien waiver form?
No. KRS Chapter 376, Kentucky's mechanics' and materialman's lien chapter, prescribes no waiver template, no required language, no notarization requirement, and no recording requirement for a lien waiver. The document is entirely a matter of private drafting, and any writing that clearly expresses an intention to release lien rights can do so. What Kentucky regulates is not the form of the waiver but when one may validly be demanded, and that rule lives outside the lien chapter altogether — in the Kentucky Fairness in Construction Act at KRS 371.400 to 371.425.
Are advance lien waivers enforceable in Kentucky?
It depends entirely on whether the project is residential. On covered work, KRS 371.405 makes void and unenforceable any construction contract provision that purports to waive, release, or extinguish rights provided by KRS Chapter 376, with an express exception for partial waivers of lien rights given by a contractor or subcontractor for progress payments. So a blanket no-lien clause in a commercial subcontract is void. But KRS 371.425 applies the Act only to public construction and public works projects and to private construction excluding residential construction. On Kentucky residential work the anti-waiver rule does not reach, and an advance waiver is governed by ordinary contract law.
What does the Kentucky Fairness in Construction Act exclude?
KRS 371.425 provides that KRS 371.400 to 371.425 apply to public construction and public works projects, and to private construction, excluding residential construction. It also carves out contracts entered into by a borrower of funds provided, insured, or guaranteed by the United States Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service, and any contract for construction of or relating to a facility as defined in KRS Chapter 278. The Act reaches only agreements made after June 26, 2007. The residential exclusion is the one that matters most in practice, because it removes the anti-waiver protection from an entire sector of Kentucky construction.
How does Kentucky define residential construction for the Fairness in Construction Act?
It does not. KRS 371.400 defines construction, contracting entity, contractor, and subcontractor, but it supplies no definition of residential construction — the term the exclusion in KRS 371.425 turns on. That leaves the boundary genuinely unsettled at the margins that matter most commercially: large multifamily apartment projects, condominium developments, student housing, senior living, and the residential component of a mixed-use building. A Kentucky subcontractor on any of those cannot tell from the face of the statute whether the anti-waiver rule protects it, which is a reason to treat the waiver sequence carefully rather than to rely on the Act.
Are progress payment lien waivers valid in Kentucky?
Yes, and they are expressly protected. KRS 371.405 voids provisions waiving or releasing KRS Chapter 376 rights but carves out partial waivers of lien rights provided by the contractor or subcontractor for progress payments. Kentucky therefore permits the routine monthly draw waiver rather than voiding it, which is the opposite of the Connecticut rule, where Conn. Gen. Stat. section 42-158l voids periodic lien waivers by name. The Kentucky carve-out is limited on its face to partial waivers tied to progress payments — a document styled as a progress waiver but drafted to release the entire contract balance is not obviously within it.
What else does KRS 371.405 make void in a Kentucky construction contract?
Three categories of provision. A clause waiving a party's right to resolve disputes through litigation, a clause waiving or releasing lien rights under KRS Chapter 376 outside the progress payment exception, and a clause waiving damages for delay. KRS 371.405 also sets the payment clocks: undisputed amounts are due from the contracting entity to the contractor within thirty business days after a payment request, and the contractor pays subcontractors within fifteen business days of receiving payment. If a provision is found unenforceable, the contract's remaining provisions are severable and survive.
What are the Kentucky mechanics lien deadlines a waiver sits inside?
A claimant without a direct contract with the owner must give the owner written notice of intention to hold the property liable within 75 days of last furnishing if the claim is under $1,000, and within 120 days if the claim is over $1,000, under KRS 376.010. The lien statement is then filed with the county clerk of the county where the property sits within six months of last furnishing under KRS 376.080, and a copy must be sent by regular mail to the owner at the owner's last known address within seven days of filing — failing that step dissolves the lien. Suit to enforce must be brought within twelve months of filing under KRS 376.090.