What does a California home improvement contract have to include?

California requires 5 categories of contract language for home improvement work over $500: 3 apply to every contract and 2 trigger on job facts such as the down payment or the total price.

Rules verified 8 Aug 2026Ruleset states-ca-2026-08.2CA Bus. & Prof. Code §7159 (home improvement contracts)

No contract produced
Bracketsight does not generate California contracts. 4 required clauses have wording the statute prescribes, and it has not been transcribed.
A paraphrase of prescribed notice text is not a weaker clause — it is a non-compliant contract. The generator fails closed rather than print something that looks official and is not. The clause table below links each one to its statute.
Unverified wording
The clause language on this page is UNVERIFIED template text awaiting construction attorney review.
Which clauses California triggers is encoded from the statutes cited below; the exact wording is not yet confirmed against primary sources. Use it as a starting point and have an attorney review the contract you sign.

Key California home improvement contract facts
Written-contract threshold	$500
Required clause categories	5
Apply to every contract	3
Trigger on job facts	2
License number on the contract	Required
Clauses with untranscribed statutory text	4
Prohibited terms listed	3

Bus. & Prof. Code §7030.5 — §7030.5 requires every licensee to include the licence number in all construction contracts, in subcontracts and calls for bid, and in all forms of advertising.

Which clauses does California require, and when?

5 required clause categories in California, with their triggers and statutes
Clause	When it applies	Statute
Written contract requiredUNVERIFIED — ATTORNEY REVIEW REQUIRED. [Template] This agreement for home improvement work over $500 is set out in writing and signed by both parties before any work begins, as California law requires. The contract price is stated on the face of this agreement, and no work outside this scope will be performed without a signed change order.	When total >= threshold	Bus. & Prof. Code §7159(c)
Three-day right to cancelThe statute prescribes this notice word-for-word. Bracketsight does not reproduce it until it has been transcribed from the statute, so no contract is generated for California. Read the statutory text	Every contract	Bus. & Prof. Code §7159(e)(6)(B)(i)
Down payment limit noticeThe statute prescribes this notice word-for-word. Bracketsight does not reproduce it until it has been transcribed from the statute, so no contract is generated for California. Read the statutory text	When downpayment > min($1000, 10%)	Bus. & Prof. Code §7159(d)(8)
Mechanics lien warningThe statute prescribes this notice word-for-word. Bracketsight does not reproduce it until it has been transcribed from the statute, so no contract is generated for California. Read the statutory text	Every contract	Bus. & Prof. Code §7159(e)(4)
CSLB information noticeThe statute prescribes this notice word-for-word. Bracketsight does not reproduce it until it has been transcribed from the statute, so no contract is generated for California. Read the statutory text	Every contract	Bus. & Prof. Code §7159(e)(5)

Getting the words right is only half of it

Prescribed wording arrives with rules about how it appears on the page. 3 of California’s 5 clause categories carry them, and the ruleset records each one in the statute’s own terms even though nothing on this site can set a per-clause type size yet. A 12-point boldface notice printed at body size fails the statute as surely as a paraphrase does, so these sit behind the transcription problem as a second blocker — and they are the reason transcribing the words would not, on its own, produce a usable California contract.

Three-day right to cancel — Bus. & Prof. Code §7159(e)(6)(B)(i)
Required on the page: at least 12-point type; boldface.
The removed placeholder merged '(five business days if you are 65 or older)' into the standard notice. That five-day window belongs to the SEPARATE senior-citizen variant and must not appear in the standard text.
The senior-citizen variant is a distinct prescribed notice and is not yet modelled as its own clause.
Down payment limit notice — Bus. & Prof. Code §7159(d)(8)
Required on the page: at least 12-point type; boldface; capitalised throughout.
§7159(d)(8) prescribes a SINGLE capitalised sentence. The removed placeholder was multi-sentence prose.
The underlying RULE — down payment may not exceed the lesser of $1,000 or 10 percent of the contract price — is verified and is what `trigger` encodes. Only the notice wording is missing.
Mechanics lien warning — Bus. & Prof. Code §7159(e)(4)
The statutory warning continues past where the removed placeholder stopped, into prescribed language on preliminary notices and joint checks.
§7159(e)(4) states no minimum point size; check the subdivision's own placement requirements when transcribing.
CSLB information notice — Bus. & Prof. Code §7159(e)(5)
Required on the page: at least 12-point type.
At least 12-point typeface. The statute does not require boldface for this notice.
The removed placeholder carried a hard-coded CSLB PO Box. Do not carry any mailing address forward without confirming it against the current statutory text — the address can change without a statutory amendment.

The same job facts select 5 of 5 clauses here

Take a job priced at $12,000 with $3,000 taken up front — a quarter down, which is ordinary practice and is not lawful everywhere. Run those two numbers through California’s triggers and 5 of the 5 clause categories apply. The table below is the engine’s own output: the reason column is the sentence the generator writes when it selects or skips a clause, not a description of one.

Which California clauses a $12,000 job with a $3,000 deposit selects, with the engine's reason for each
Clause	At these facts	Why
Written contract required	Fires	Contract total $12,000.00 meets the state home-improvement threshold of $500.00.
Three-day right to cancel	Fires	Required in every home-improvement contract.
Down payment limit notice	Fires	Down payment $3,000.00 exceeds the cap of $1,000.00 (lesser of $1,000.00 and 10% of the $12,000.00 total).
Mechanics lien warning	Fires	Required in every home-improvement contract.
CSLB information notice	Fires	Required in every home-improvement contract.

1 of those clauses key on the deposit rather than the price, which is where the five states pull apart hardest. In one the deposit only has to exist before an escrow duty attaches to it. In another it is capped at the lesser of a flat sum and a percentage of the price, so on any job above ten thousand dollars the flat sum binds and the percentage never comes into it. In a third the cap is a full third of the price, but only once the price is above five thousand. The same $3,000 is therefore routine in one state and over a ceiling in the next. Change the deposit on the sheet and the clause set changes with it.

One defect you can read straight off the trigger column above: it fires at exactly $500, while the provisions behind these thresholds are written in terms of a price that exceeds the figure rather than one that meets it. A contract at precisely the threshold therefore picks up a clause the statute does not require. It over-includes rather than omits, which is the safe direction, and it is a defect rather than a design choice.

What cannot go in a California home improvement contract?

Any waiver of the buyer's right to cancel
Confession of judgment or waiver of legal rights
Payment schedule that exceeds the value of work performed and materials delivered

Who actually read the California statute

Every California rule on this page was read from the state's own site — leginfo returned Bus. & Prof. Code §7159 and §7030.5 on the 15 August 2026 verification pass. That is the strongest sourcing of the five states, and it is the reason the four untranscribed notices can be described so precisely: the statute was open in front of the person who logged them. It also caught a merge error worth naming. The deleted placeholder for the three-day cancellation notice had folded in the five-business-day window that belongs to the separate senior-citizen variant, which is a distinct prescribed notice and is not modelled here at all.

A citation nobody has opened is not a citation, and a secondary host is a cross-check rather than an authority, so those distinctions are recorded against each California rule instead of being averaged into a confidence badge. A second kind of gap is logged the same way: in three of the five states the drafted contract-contents clause lists fewer elements than its own section enumerates, which makes a generated contract incomplete rather than misworded. Neither failure is visible from the document itself, which is why the states-ca-2026-08.2 ruleset behind this page keeps its record in the open on sources and in the changelog.

None of this is legal advice, and none of it substitutes for a construction attorney reading the contract you intend to sign. What it can do is tell you which of California’s 5 clause categories your job’s numbers trigger and exactly where the statute behind each one lives, so the conversation with an attorney starts from the text instead of from a blank page — and so a missing clause is something you find before a customer’s lawyer does.

Why there is no California contract to build

The generator refuses California until the prescribed notice text is transcribed from the statute. You can still price the job, and the takeoff sheet and invoice work normally — but the price is an estimate, not a binding quote.