Lien waiver escrow holds a subcontractor’s payment and releases it the moment they sign a valid lien waiver — so the general contractor never pays without a waiver in hand, and the sub never waives lien rights without being paid. One exchange, no gap, no one going first.
Why it exists
Every progress payment in construction runs into the same standoff. Without escrow, one party carries the exposure in the gap between payment and waiver.
Pay first and the sub might never return a signed waiver — leaving you exposed to a lien on a bill you already paid. Double-payment is the nightmare: pay the sub, the sub doesn’t pay their supplier, the supplier liens your project.
Sign an unconditional waiver first and you’ve given up your lien rights before the money arrives. If payment is slow or never comes, you’ve waived your strongest leverage for nothing.
The old workaround is an attorney or title company who holds the funds and the signed waiver and hands them over together. It works — but it’s slow and costs real money per transaction, which is why almost nobody does it for routine progress payments. Escrow software automates that same exchange for every pay cycle.
How SureHold automates it
When the GC creates a payment, SureHold holds the money via Stripe Connect. The sub can see the payment is real and waiting — it just hasn’t released yet.
The sub gets a one-click signing link (no account) for the correct conditional waiver, pre-filled from the project and pay-period data.
On signature, the escrowed payment releases and the conditional waiver converts to unconditional. Neither side ever carries the gap.
SureHold isn’t the only software that ties a valid waiver to payment, and we won’t pretend otherwise. Procore Pay locks a signed unconditional waiver until the invoice is paid in full; GCPay collects a watermarked unconditional waiver and removes the watermark on payment; Trimble Pay (formerly Flashtract) holds the signed waiver in a vault until the sub is paid.
What’s different about SureHold: it’s self-serve, with published pricing and a free tier, it holds the payment itself in escrow (not just the document), and it doesn’t require adopting an ERP suite or moving your existing payment rails. Most of the others are quote-only, platform-locked, or aimed at enterprise GCs.
FAQ
Lien waiver escrow is an arrangement where a subcontractor’s payment is held by a neutral mechanism and released at the same moment the subcontractor signs a valid lien waiver. It closes the timing gap that normally forces one side to go first — the GC paying before they hold a waiver, or the sub waiving lien rights before they’re paid.
Requiring a waiver alongside the pay app still leaves a sequence problem: someone signs or pays first, and a manual step (or a forgotten one) sits in between. Escrow removes the sequence — the release of funds and the signing of the waiver are the same event.
Traditionally, yes — the common workaround is to have an attorney or title company hold the funds and the signed waiver and release both together. That works but is slow and expensive per transaction. Software like SureHold automates the same exchange for every pay cycle without a per-deal attorney.
No — and we won’t claim that. Several enterprise platforms couple payment to a waiver in some form (Procore Pay locks a signed waiver until the invoice is paid; GCPay uses a watermarked-waiver release; Trimble Pay holds the waiver in a vault until payment lands). What’s different about SureHold is that it’s self-serve with published pricing and a free tier, and it holds the payment itself in escrow rather than requiring you to adopt a whole ERP or move your payment rails.
Funds are held via Stripe Connect, which is regulated and FDIC pass-through insured. SureHold is not itself a bank or escrow company; it orchestrates the hold and release on top of Stripe’s infrastructure.
Nothing releases. The funds stay staged in escrow. The GC can resend the signing link, follow up, or cancel the payment entirely. The waiver and the money move together or not at all.
SureHold holds the payment and releases it the instant the waiver is signed. Free up to 10 payments a month — no card, no demo.
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