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How much cash is locked in retainage right now?

Retainage doesn't hit your P&L — but it's usually the single biggest reason commercial contractors run out of working capital. Pick your trade, plug in your backlog, see what's locked.

Sam Young
Built by Sam Young, Founder & CEO · LinkedIn ↗
Ex-CFO across trades, SaaS & services · $2.5B in service-business transactions · Stanford MBA

Question 1 of 3

What kind of work do you do?

Different trades have different industry-standard retainage terms (5–10%, hold periods 30–120 days).

Want a real model on your active backlog?

We'll connect to your job costing, pull every active contract, calculate retainage by GC and project, and show you which contracts to renegotiate first.

From clients

What contractors say after working with us.

We had $480K in retainage nobody was tracking past 12 months — some of it 3+ years old. Sam built us a release schedule by GC by job. Recovered $310K in five months. The other $170K we wrote off and stopped working with the GCs that didn't pay.
Greg M. · President · $8M mechanical contractor · CA
Retainage was a black hole. Three jobs from 2023 we'd basically given up on. Sam helped us draft the demand letter and walked us through the lien filing. Two settled in 60 days. The third we filed against and that one's still working through.
Tony R. · Owner · $5M commercial GC · NY
Bonded jobs were eating our cash. We'd hit substantial completion and then wait 8–14 months for retainage. Sam restructured how we bid — built the retainage cost INTO the bid so we stopped subsidizing GCs with our own working capital. Net margin up 4 points.
Brett L. · Owner · $12M fire protection contractor · TX

Simple pricing

Three tiers, one ladder.

$99-$500/mo

Bookkeeping

The clean data layer: monthly books, reconciliations, and organized financials AI can work with.

$1,500-$5,000/mo

Scale

The full AI operating layer — custom agents, weekly actions, and benchmarks to grow margin per hour.

Custom

Platform / Multi-Office

Multi-branch benchmarking and scorecards for PE-backed and multi-location groups.

Related reading

See exactly which contracts are locking up your cash

Drop your info and the Level team will reach out to walk through your backlog. Free audit included.

2,200+ service businesses benchmarked$13.25B in revenue analyzedWeekly action cadence

No credit card. 15-min audit. We only follow up if we can actually help.

No commitment. Real numbers, not generic advice.