Until recently, Louisiana's Prompt Payment Statute (La. R.S. 9:2784) pointed in one direction. It told contractors how fast to push money downstream and punished them when they did not. It never meaningfully told the owner when to pay in the first place. Louisiana Act 822 closes that gap effective August 1, 2026, and it does so with teeth.

1. Owners have a deadline now. It is 35 days from receipt of a written payment request covering properly performed work, suitably stored materials, or specially fabricated materials, absent a good faith dispute. A modest extension applies where financing was in place beforehand and disbursement was timely sought.
2. The downstream window is halved. Seven days rather than fourteen, at every tier.
3. The 15 percent ceiling is gone. The replacement penalty runs at 1.5 percent per month, uncapped, until payment or judgment.
4. You cannot contract around it. A waiver is an absolute nullity subject to narrow exceptions, the prevailing party recovers fees and costs, and the old residential carve-out has been eliminated.

The uncapped penalty is the provision that changes behavior. Exposure used to be a finite number that a defendant could reserve against and negotiate toward. A dispute that takes two years to resolve now carries roughly 36 percent in penalties on top of principal, and the claimant has every incentive to let the clock run rather than compromise.

Because contract waivers are off the table, expect the defense response to be procedural: what constitutes receipt of a written payment request, whether a pay application was complete enough to start the clock, and what qualifies as a good faith dispute. Those are the terms to define in pay application protocols, and the time to do it is before August 1.

Public work is governed separately. Louisiana Act 822 leaves R.S. 38:2191 alone, but Louisiana Act 255 amended that statute in the same session to bar public entities from withholding contested liquidated damages and to add two-way fee shifting. Anyone working across both needs to track two sets of rules.