A price isn't a proposal
Most estimating tools treat a proposal as a price plus a signature line. For a lot of residential work, that is missing language the law requires to actually be there — not as boilerplate, but printed in specific places, in specific wording, tied to specific facts about the job.
Which notices apply depends on three things: where the work is, what kind of job it is, and how it was sold. The same repaint can need different language depending on whether it was signed at the customer's kitchen table or at a showroom.
The federal rule almost nobody reads until they need it
The FTC's "cooling-off rule" (16 CFR 429.1) gives a residential customer three business days to cancel a contract signed away from the seller's regular place of business, for jobs of $25 or more — the statement has to appear in the contract itself, and the customer gets two copies of a cancellation form, dated at signing.
If the home was built before 1978 and the work disturbs paint, the EPA's lead-based-paint pamphlet requirement (40 CFR 745.84) applies on top of that. Neither of these is optional paperwork; both are federal requirements that show up on almost every kitchen-table sale in an older home.
Then the states add their own
States layer additional notices on top of the federal ones, and they do not agree with each other. Washington requires specific contract language above a $1,000 residential threshold (RCW 18.27.114). Florida requires a lien-rights notice on its own signed and dated page above $2,500 (Fla. Stat. 713.015), a separate recovery-fund statement (489.1425), and a one-sentence requirement on every written contract regardless of size (558.005). California has its own set built around B&P 7159.
None of this is exotic — it is public statute text, and a contractor licensed in one state has usually already seen the version that applies to them. What is easy to miss is that it is job-specific, not company-wide: a contractor who repaints on Monday and re-roofs on Friday can owe different notices on those two proposals, because the trade and the value both change what applies.
Where this tends to get skipped
A polished, AI-generated proposal with a clean line-item breakdown can still be missing every one of these — itemization and legal compliance are two different problems, and a tool built to solve the first one does not automatically solve the second. We built this because it is exactly the kind of requirement that is invisible until a customer, an inspector, or a licensing board asks for it, and by then it is too late to add.
BidPilot resolves the notices a job needs from a maintained library — federal coverage, built-in state text for Washington and Florida, and a starter pack for California — prints them where the source requires (the cancellation statement directly above the signature, for example), and flags a notice with a blank left unfilled before you send. Any other state is covered the same way any contractor can use: save your own notice, in your own wording, and it prints on every proposal it applies to.
What this is not
It's a maintained library to draw from, not a legal opinion that a specific proposal is compliant. Coverage is real but not exhaustive — today it is federal plus Washington and Florida in full, and a California starter pack, with other states covered through a contractor's own saved notices rather than a built-in library entry. The right move is still to check the specific wording that applies to you with your own attorney or licensing board, the same way you would before this software existed.