Ask when a construction lien deadline falls and the honest answer is always “in which province.” The clock, the trigger, and even the number of steps change at every border.
Key takeaways
Every province splits the process into at least two steps, and conflating them is the most common way a real deadline gets missed. The first step secures the claim against the property (register, preserve, publish); the second step forces the claim to be tested in court before it disappears (perfect, commence an action, register a certificate of pending litigation). A claimant who completes only the first step and assumes the lien is now safe indefinitely is wrong in every province covered here.
None of these deadlines are the only tool available. In Ontario specifically, a live payment dispute can also move through adjudication, which runs on its own, much shorter timeline and doesn't require registering anything against title at all — the two routes solve different problems and aren't mutually exclusive.
Ontario's first deadline is 60 days from the event that starts the clock — publication of a certificate of substantial performance, completion, abandonment, or a contractor's or supplier's own last day of work or delivery, depending on their position in the chain. Preserving means registering a claim for lien against title. The second deadline is 90 days after the lien was preserved, and perfecting means starting a court action and setting it down for trial (or the equivalent step where the lien attaches to holdback rather than land).
Missing either deadline extinguishes the lien — the right to register is lost after 60 days, and a preserved-but-unperfected lien simply expires after 90. Losing the lien is not the same as losing the debt: the underlying contract claim can still be sued on, but the security against the property is gone.
Ontario's own version of Alberta's certificate-of-substantial-performance trigger and BC's certificate-of-completion trigger is broader by design: the same 60-day preservation clock can start from four different events depending on the claimant's position in the payment chain, which is exactly why holdback release and lien preservation don't share one single date on an Ontario project the way they sometimes do elsewhere.
BC's Builders Lien Act runs a shorter first window than Ontario's. Section 20 allows a claim of lien to be filed no later than 45 days after a certificate of completion is issued, or 45 days after the head contract or the improvement is completed, abandoned or terminated. Filed late, s. 22 provides the lien is simply extinguished.
The enforcement step runs on a much longer clock than Ontario's 90 days. Section 33(1) requires the action plus a certificate of pending litigation to be registered within one year of the lien's filing — but a lien claimant can also be forced to move faster: s. 33(2) lets an owner or another claimant serve a notice requiring an action to be commenced within 21 days of service.
Manitoba's registration windows are role-specific but converge on the same figure. A contractor's lien claim may be registered within 60 days after substantial performance or abandonment; a subcontractor's within 60 days of the earlier of the head contract's or the subcontract's own substantial performance or abandonment; and a materials or services claim within 60 days of the same triggers or the last supply date.
What happens after registration is unusually generous compared to Ontario or BC. Section 49(2) lets a duly registered lien stand for up to two years after registration before it ceases to exist, unless an action is commenced and a pending litigation order registered sooner. That two-year runway can be cut short: under s. 50(2), if an owner serves formal notice demanding action, the claimant has only 30 days from the mailing of that notice to commence the action and register the order, or the lien lapses.
Nova Scotia runs its own two-step version. The Nova Scotia Builders' Lien Act gives 60 days from a claimant's last day of work or last supply of materials to register the lien at the Land Registration Office. Perfecting it is a separate, longer deadline measured from the same start date: a Statement of Claim must be filed with the Nova Scotia Supreme Court within 105 calendar days of the last day of work to perfect the lien and prevent it from expiring — and that 105-day clock runs from the last day of work, not from the date the lien was registered.
Quebec doesn't use the word “lien” the same way at all. Its security — the legal hypothec of construction — is published against the property within up to 30 days after the work is finished, according to Éducaloi, Quebec's public legal-information service. It is worth naming Quebec's mechanism separately rather than trying to fit a 30-day figure into the same “lien deadline” framework the common-law provinces use.
A worked example — one missed payment date, three provinces
A supplier delivers its last shipment of materials to three separate job sites on the same date: one in Ontario, one in Manitoba, one in Nova Scotia. In Ontario, the supplier has 60 days from that delivery date to register a claim for lien, then 90 more days to start and perfect an action. In Manitoba, the supplier has 60 days from the same trigger to register — the same first number — but then up to two years, not 90 days, before an action must be commenced, unless the owner forces the issue with a 30-day notice.
In Nova Scotia the first number is also 60 days, but the second deadline is 105 days from that same delivery date, not from the date of registration — so the supplier who waited until day 58 to register in Nova Scotia has only 47 days left to perfect, not a fresh 105. Three provinces, the same triggering event, and three genuinely different calendars running from it.
No. Every province sets its own periods under its own statute, and the numbers above range from 45 to 60 days for the first step and from 90 days to two years for the second. Treating any one province's numbers as the national default is the most common way a real deadline gets missed.
The lien is extinguished — the security against the property is gone. In most of these provinces the underlying contract or debt claim can still be pursued through the courts; what is lost is the ability to force payment out of the property itself.
Almost never the invoice date. Every province covered here starts the clock from an event tied to the work itself — substantial performance, completion, abandonment, or the claimant's own last day of work or last supply — not from when a bill was sent.
Quebec's Civil Code security for construction is a legal hypothec published against the immovable, structurally different from a common-law builders' lien even though it serves a comparable purpose. Éducaloi describes the mechanism and its 30-day publication window without reference to lien terminology.
This page covers what s. 41 of Alberta's Prompt Payment and Construction Lien Act actually publishes: the 60 and 90-day registration deadlines by claimant type. The further step of commencing court action to enforce a registered Alberta lien runs on its own limitation provisions in the Act, and the current figure should be confirmed directly rather than assumed from another province's enforcement window.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself here.
