Massachusetts contractors got a clear instruction in June, and it isn’t the one either side wanted. Reject an invoice sloppily and you pay it. Then you can go get the money back.
The Supreme Judicial Court decided J.C. Cannistraro, LLC v. Columbia Construction Co. on June 26, 2026, and the ruling has been working its way through the state’s construction bar since.
What went wrong on the invoices
Columbia Construction received invoices from subcontractor J.C. Cannistraro totaling roughly $925,000 for disputed change order work. Columbia rejected them. What it didn’t do was satisfy the good-faith certification requirement the Massachusetts Prompt Pay Act imposes on any rejection.
Under the Act, a rejection that doesn’t meet the statutory form isn’t a rejection. The invoice is deemed approved and the money is due. That much was already understood. The open question was what happens next.
Deemed approval isn’t a final judgment
The SJC upheld an arbitration award that let Columbia recover a substantial portion of what it had been forced to pay. The court reaffirmed that the Prompt Pay Act doesn’t preempt common-law defenses or recoupment claims, and it endorsed the arbitrator’s sequence: pay the deemed-approved amount, then pursue the underlying dispute on its merits.
So the Act controls cash flow timing. It doesn’t decide who was right about the change order.
That’s a narrower reading than subcontractors hoped for. It’s also more workable. A statute that converted every procedural slip into a permanent windfall would push GCs toward reflexive rejection of everything, which is the opposite of what prompt payment laws are for.
What it changes in practice
The compliance burden lands squarely on project accounting. Rejection deadlines, written reasons, and the certification language have to be right every time, on every pay application, without exception. Most firms handle that with a template and a calendar, and most firms discover the gap only when a dispute reaches counsel.
The cash-flow exposure is real. Paying $925,000 you believe you don’t owe, then waiting out an arbitration to recover it, is a working capital event even for a well-capitalized general contractor.
The effect runs downstream too. Subcontractors on large public and institutional jobs, the kind of small and local firms that carried a meaningful share of Skanska’s $380 million LAX roadway and utility package, are exactly the parties prompt pay statutes were written to protect, because they’re the least able to float a disputed payment.
Beyond Massachusetts
Most states have prompt payment statutes and most are enforced loosely. Massachusetts courts have gone the other way, treating the procedural requirements as strict conditions. Other jurisdictions tend to borrow reasoning from states that have already litigated the question.
The takeaway travels regardless of state line. If you’re withholding, document it exactly the way the statute says. The paperwork is cheaper than the float.