Commercial Tenant Owes Back Rent? What Texas Landlords Can Actually Collect

The ledger says ninety-four days. The tenant’s lights are still on, the sign is still up, cars are in the lot at nine in the morning — and the last three emails to their operations manager have gone nowhere.

Or the other version: you opened the suite on the first and found a rolling chair, a dead printer, and four clean bolt holes in the drywall where the point-of-sale bracket used to be.

Two different problems, two different playbooks.

The short answer: as a nonresidential landlord in Texas you hold a statutory preference lien on the tenant’s property inside the building, covering rent already due and rent to become due during the current 12-month period (Tex. Prop. Code § 54.021). It is broader than it first reads, carries a county-clerk filing requirement that is easy to miss, and ends one month after the tenant abandons the space. Separately, you have four years to sue on the debt (Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.004(a)(3)). And the consumer rules your search results keep quoting generally do not govern a business tenant’s lease.

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The advice you’re finding was written for a different tenant

Search “collect unpaid rent” and most of what comes back is written for residential landlords — built around the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and consumer credit reporting. Neither is the right frame for your file.

The FDCPA defines “debt” as an obligation arising out of a transaction in which the money, property, insurance, or services “are primarily for personal, family, or household purposes” (15 U.S.C. § 1692a(5)). The Texas Debt Collection Act tracks the same idea — “consumer debt” is an obligation “primarily for personal, family, or household purposes,” and a “consumer” is “an individual who has a consumer debt” (Tex. Fin. Code § 392.001). Rent owed by an operating business on commercial space is not that. The consumer statutes generally do not reach it.

That is not a loophole. Your constraints are simply different ones: your lease, the Property Code, and ordinary contract law. Consumer-calibrated advice skips what matters here — like the six-month filing deadline below. For the wider view, see commercial debt collection laws in Texas. (A related correction: Texas does not license collection agencies. Finance Code § 392.101 requires a third-party debt collector to carry a $10,000 surety bond and file a copy of it with the secretary of state — a bond, not a license. Collection attorneys are licensed; that is different.)

Playbook A — the tenant is still in the space

The lien you already have

Section 54.021 is short:

A person who leases or rents all or part of a building for nonresidential use has a preference lien on the property of the tenant or subtenant in the building for rent that is due and for rent that is to become due during the current 12-month period succeeding the date of the beginning of the rental agreement or an anniversary of that date.

Three things in that sentence do work. It is automatic — no lien clause needed in your lease. It covers future rent, not just arrears; “rent that is to become due during the current 12-month period” is the phrase worth reading twice. And it reaches property “in the building” — not the truck parked elsewhere, not the receivables. The section is written around a building, so a lease of bare land sits outside its text.

A warning about Chapter 54: it holds more than one landlord’s lien. Subchapter B (§§ 54.021–54.025) is yours. Subchapter C (§§ 54.041–54.048) is the residential lien. If you have found a page listing exempt property — wearing apparel, schoolbooks, a family library, one couch and two living room chairs, children’s toys — you are reading § 54.042, which sits in the residential subchapter. It is not your exemption list.

Your subchapter’s exemption provision is one sentence, § 54.023: “This subchapter does not affect a statute exempting property from forced sale.” How your lien ranks against a lender’s perfected security interest in the same equipment turns on facts and filings. Ask counsel before assuming you are first in line.

The six-month filing requirement

This is the deadline that quietly takes a commercial landlord’s lien out of play. Under § 54.022(a), the lien “is unenforceable for rent on a commercial building that is more than six months past due unless the landlord files a lien statement with the county clerk of the county in which the building is located.”

The statement must be verified by the landlord, the landlord’s agent, or attorney, and § 54.022(b) requires all four of:

1. an account, itemized by month, of the rent for which the lien is claimed;
2. the name and address of the tenant or subtenant, if any;
3. a description of the leased premises; and
4. the beginning and termination dates of the lease.

The county clerk indexes these alphabetically. Miss the filing and the lien for that aged rent stops being enforceable. If your ledger is nearing six months, handle this before the next round of calls.

Seizure: what the statute does and does not give you

Subchapter B grants a lien. It does not hand you a self-help procedure to walk in, take the equipment, and sell it. The seizure-and-sale mechanics landlords find online — notice, storage, public sale — are §§ 54.044 and 54.045, residential again. Importing them into a commercial tenancy is the kind of mistake that turns a collection file into a lawsuit against you.

What Subchapter B does describe is a distress warrant: under § 54.025, the person to whom rent is payable, or their agent or attorney, may apply to the justice of the peace in the precinct where the building is located if the tenant owes rent, is about to abandon the building, or is about to remove property from it. That is a court process. Do not seize anything without counsel.

Lockouts under § 93.002 — narrow, and the lease can rewrite them

Section 93.002(c) states the rule plainly: a landlord may not intentionally prevent a tenant from entering the leased premises except by judicial process — unless the exclusion results from bona fide repairs, construction, or an emergency; removing the contents of abandoned premises; or changing the door locks of a tenant who is delinquent in paying at least part of the rent.

If you change the locks for delinquency, § 93.002(f) requires you to “place a written notice on the tenant’s front door stating the name and the address or telephone number of the individual or company from which the new key may be obtained.” The key is required only during the tenant’s regular business hours, and only if the tenant pays the delinquent rent.

Two adjacent prohibitions matter as much: no cutting utility service the tenant pays directly to the utility company absent bona fide repairs, construction, or an emergency (§ 93.002(a)); no removing doors, windows, locks, hinges, or landlord-furnished fixtures except for a bona fide repair or replacement, promptly performed (§ 93.002(b)).

The penalty is specific. Under § 93.002(g), the tenant may recover possession or terminate the lease, and recover actual damages, one month’s rent or $500 (whichever is greater), reasonable attorney’s fees, and court costs, less delinquent rents.

Then the subsection that makes commercial different from residential, § 93.002(h): “A lease supersedes this section to the extent of any conflict.” Your lease may expand these rights, narrow them, or set its own procedure. Read the lease before the statute, and put a lawyer on it before anyone touches a lock.

Playbook B — the tenant is already gone

Different clock, different tools.

Section 93.002(d) supplies a presumption: a tenant is presumed to have abandoned the premises if property “in an amount substantial enough to indicate a probable intent to abandon the premises” is being or has been removed outside the normal course of the tenant’s business.

Once premises are abandoned, § 93.002(e) lets you remove and store what the tenant left, and dispose of it if unclaimed 60 days after storage — but only after mailing notice to that effect, certified, to the tenant’s last known address.

Meanwhile the lien is running out. Section 54.024: “The lien exists while the tenant occupies the building and until one month after the day that the tenant abandons the building.” That is the sharpest deadline on this page. If your tenant cleared out three weeks ago, you are counting days.

And one duty you cannot contract around: § 91.006 gives a landlord a duty to mitigate damages when a tenant abandons in violation of the lease, and makes any lease provision waiving that duty void. Start a re-letting file on day one — listing dates, broker engagement, showings, offers received and why they were declined. That file supports your damages number later, and its absence is the first thing a defense lawyer will look for.

Beyond that, this is an ordinary commercial collection: a company that moved, an entity with a possible successor, maybe a guarantor. Finding the operating business, its new address, and its principals is skip tracing and asset investigation work — and it is what tells you whether anything is there to pursue.

The deadlines, in one place

That third row matters: a written lease can contract around the three-day default in either direction, and § 24.005(a) allows it. Send what your lease requires. One wrinkle in the same subsection: if possession is terminated solely for nonpayment and the tenant was not late in any earlier month, the notice must be a notice to pay rent or vacate.

What actually moves money

The lien and the lockout are leverage. Neither is payment. The sequence that matters is unglamorous:

1. Confirm who is on the hook — the signing entity, any guarantor, any successor now operating in the same trade.
2. Read the lease against the statute. Section 93.002(h) means your lease may control notice, cure, late charges, and fees.
3. Preserve the lien. Past six months, file the § 54.022 statement with the correct county clerk, all four elements.
4. Document mitigation from day one if the tenant is gone.
5. Demand with specifics — itemized by month, lease provision and statutory basis named. Vagueness reads as bluff.
6. Escalate before the trail cools. Equipment moves, entities dissolve, principals reappear under new names.

A tenant who has stopped answering their landlord may still be answering other people. Changing who is asking is one of the few variables you control. Alexander, Strauss & Associates works commercial landlord files as business-to-business collection and commercial real estate accounts — skip tracing, field visits to the debtor’s place of business, and, where warranted, referral to licensed collection attorneys, with the fee agreed before you place anything. If you already hold a judgment, collecting it in Texas is a separate discipline, with its own enforcement tools and its own post-judgment work.

Your next step, today

Put three documents on the desk: the lease, the rent ledger, and the guaranty if there is one. Then answer two questions.

How many months past due is the oldest unpaid rent? If more than six, the § 54.022 county-clerk filing is your first call, not your last.

Is the tenant still in the building? If not, count one month forward from the day they left. That is what remains of your lien under § 54.024, and it is shorter than you think.

Everything else can wait a week. Those two cannot.

General information for commercial creditors, not legal advice. Laws and deadlines change and depend on the facts — confirm specifics with qualified counsel.