Louisiana Wage Garnishment Laws: The Statute Names What Is Exempt, Not What You Can Take
Most state garnishment statutes tell a creditor the maximum it may seize. Louisiana does the opposite. La. R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a) is written as a list of what is exempt from seizure, and the reader has to subtract. Seventy-five percent of disposable earnings is exempt, so twenty-five percent is reachable — which lands where most of the country lands. Then the support figures invert the intuition. The exemption for a child-support obligation is fifty percent, which means fifty percent is reachable, not fifty percent protected. The exemption for spousal support is sixty percent, so forty percent is reachable. Read those numbers as caps and you get the child-support case exactly backwards. Below: the three percentages read both ways, the single writ that keeps running under R.S. 13:3923, two different 180-day clocks that kill a seizure for two different reasons, who primes whom when several creditors are queued on one paycheck, and why a wage garnishment is the only continuing garnishment Louisiana has.
The Short Version
- R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a) exempts 75 percent of disposable earnings, so an ordinary judgment creditor reaches 25 percent, subject to a floor stated in the statute as thirty times the federal minimum hourly wage.
- The same sentence exempts 50 percent for a current or past-due child-support obligation and 60 percent for spousal support — meaning 50 percent and 40 percent respectively are reachable. The bigger percentage protects less.
- R.S. 13:3923 needs only one writ and one set of interrogatories; the court fixes daily, weekly, semimonthly or monthly payments “until the indebtedness is paid”.
- There are two 180-day rules and they are not the same rule. R.S. 13:3923’s runs from the debtor’s termination of employment. C.C.P. art. 2411(B)(2)’s runs from the filing of the answers to the interrogatories.
- C.C.P. art. 2411(C) says in terms that wages are the only continuing garnishment in Louisiana; a bank garnishment reaches only what the garnishee held when the interrogatories were served.
- R.S. 13:3922 gives the first seizer priority over anything subsequent — but R.S. 13:3928 lets a support judgment prime “any prior or subsequent” judgment, so support jumps an existing queue.
The Louisiana Rule: Read the Percentage Backwards
Every figure in R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a) is an exemption. Subtract it from 100 to get what a creditor takes.
Louisiana never states a garnishment ceiling. It states a shield, and the shield shrinks as the obligation becomes more favoured. Ordinary judgment debt: 75 percent exempt, 25 percent reachable. Child support: 50 percent exempt, 50 percent reachable. Spousal support: 60 percent exempt, 40 percent reachable. A creditor or a debtor who skims the section and sees “fifty percent” next to child support will assume half the paycheck is safe; the statute says the opposite, and it is the single most consequential misreading in Louisiana wage-garnishment practice. Everything else on this page — the one-writ rule, the two 180-day clocks, the priority contest, the three-dollar processing fee — sits on top of that inversion.
Watch: Louisiana Wage Garnishment, Explained
Seizure, the interrogatories, and the continuing 25 percent cap.
Watch Overview
Louisiana States What Is Exempt, Not What Is Seizable
R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a), read as written.
Here is the operative sentence, from the Louisiana State Legislature’s own print of the section. Note that the heading of the section is “General exemptions from seizure”, and that every number in it is a number the debtor keeps:
“A. The following income or property of a debtor is exempt from seizure under any writ, mandate, or process whatsoever, except as otherwise herein provided: (1)(a) Seventy-five percent of his disposable earnings for any week, but in no case shall this exemption be less than an amount in disposable earnings which is equal to thirty times the federal minimum hourly wage in effect at the time the earnings are payable or a multiple or fraction thereof, according to whether the employee’s pay period is greater or less than one week. However, the exemption from disposable earnings for the payment of a current or past due support obligation, or both, for a child or children is fifty percent of disposable earnings, and the exemption from seizure of the disposable earnings for the payment of a current or past due support obligation … for a spouse or former spouse is sixty percent of the disposable earnings.”
Three consequences follow, and only the first is intuitive.
1. Ordinary judgments: 75 exempt, 25 reachable
On a credit-card judgment, a medical judgment, a deficiency, or a debt-buyer judgment, the employer withholds up to a quarter of disposable earnings. That figure is the same one most states use, so the arithmetic will look familiar even though the drafting does not. The statutory floor is expressed as thirty times the federal minimum hourly wage, prorated up or down when the pay period is longer or shorter than a week — the section refers only to the federal minimum hourly wage, and this page does not assert anything beyond that about Louisiana wage-floor law. Our Montana wage garnishment page works through the federal 15 U.S.C. 1673 formula in full, because Montana’s statute incorporates it by express reference; there is no reason to repeat that arithmetic here.
2. Child support: 50 exempt, 50 reachable
This is the trap. The exemption drops to half, which means half the disposable earnings are reachable for a current or past-due child-support obligation. A debtor who reads “fifty percent” and relaxes has it backwards, and so does a creditor who assumes the support order is capped at the ordinary quarter.
3. Spousal support: 60 exempt, 40 reachable
Spousal support sits between the two: the shield is sixty percent, so forty percent is reachable. Counter-intuitively, the larger exemption percentage is the more protective one, which is why the same three numbers have to be read in the same direction every time.
The combined-order rule most summaries skip
R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a) closes with an allocation rule that decides real cases. Where the Department of Children and Family Services is providing support enforcement services to the spouse and the judgment or order covers both a child and a spouse, or where the order “does not clearly indicate which amount is attributable to support of the child or children and which amount is attributable to support of the spouse or former spouse”, the whole obligation “shall be treated as if it is exclusively for the support of a child or children”. In plain terms: an unallocated combined support order is treated as child support, which is the fifty-percent-exempt limb, not the sixty. That is a five-point swing in what the employer withholds, decided by whether the underlying order broke the numbers out.
What “disposable earnings” means here
R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(b) defines the base, and Louisiana’s definition is wider than “gross minus taxes”. Disposable earnings are what remains after amounts required by law to be withheld and after amounts that “are reasonable and are being deducted in the usual course of business at the time the garnishment is served upon the employer for the purpose of providing benefits for retirement, medical insurance coverage, life insurance coverage”, plus amounts legally due or owed to the employer in the usual course of business at the time the garnishment is served. A debtor with generous benefit deductions therefore has a smaller base, and the twenty-five percent is twenty-five percent of that smaller number. The clock matters too: the deductions counted are those running at the time the garnishment is served, not whatever the payroll file shows later.
One caution about the federal overlay
The federal Consumer Credit Protection Act sets its own ceilings on garnishment to enforce a support order — a ladder of percentages turning on the debtor’s other dependants, with a higher rung again where the arrears predate a twelve-week look-back window (15 U.S.C. 1673(b)(2); the rungs are set out in full on the Montana page linked above). Louisiana’s exemption and the federal ceiling are separate constraints that both apply, so the operative figure on any given paycheck is whichever leaves the debtor with more. Aggregator pages routinely print the federal support percentages under a Louisiana heading and never mention R.S. 13:3881’s own figures; the two are not the same numbers and they do not mean the same thing.
La. R.S. 13:3881 is the source for every percentage in this section.
The Three Percentages, Read Both Ways
Left column is what the statute says. Right column is what the employer withholds.
| Obligation being enforced | Statute says EXEMPT | Therefore REACHABLE | Where it says so |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ordinary money judgment | 75% of disposable earnings | 25% | R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a), first clause |
| Child support, current or past due | 50% of disposable earnings | 50% | R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a), second sentence |
| Spousal or former-spousal support | 60% of disposable earnings | 40% | R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a), second sentence |
| Combined order, amounts not broken out, DCFS enforcing | 50% — treated as child support | 50% | R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a), closing sentence |
| Floor that overrides the percentage | 30 x the federal minimum hourly wage, prorated to the pay period | Nothing below the floor | R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a), proviso |
How to sanity-check any Louisiana figure you read elsewhere: ask whether the number is described as an exemption or as a cap. If a page says “Louisiana allows 50 percent for child support” it happens to be right, but for the wrong reason; if it says “Louisiana protects 50 percent for child support” it has copied the statutory number into the wrong column and every downstream calculation is wrong by half a paycheck.
One Writ, and It Keeps Running
R.S. 13:3923 — the section that makes Louisiana wage garnishment durable.
R.S. 13:3923 opens with a sentence that does a lot of work: “It shall not be necessary that more than one writ of garnishment or one set of interrogatories be served in a garnishment proceeding, but the court shall render judgment for the monthly, semimonthly, weekly, or daily payments to be made to the seizing creditor according to the manner best suited to the circumstances, until the indebtedness is paid.” One service, one set of interrogatories, and a judgment shaped to the debtor’s actual pay cycle. The creditor does not re-file each period, and the court is directed to match the withholding rhythm to how the employer actually pays.
What the garnisher has to serve
The same subsection lists the packet: the citation, the petition, the garnishment interrogatories, the notice of seizure, and a statement of sums due under the garnishment. That statement is not boilerplate — the section says it must include, but is not limited to, “the principal, interest, court costs incurred to date, and attorney fees due under the judgment”. A garnishment served without a current, itemised statement of sums due is served without something R.S. 13:3923 requires.
The court keeps the file
R.S. 13:3923 also provides that the court “in its discretion, may reopen the case upon the motion of any party concerned for evidence affecting the proper continuance of the garnishment judgment”, and that “the court shall retain jurisdiction to amend or set aside its garnishment judgment at any time in its discretion”. A Louisiana continuing garnishment is therefore durable but never final: either side can come back, and the judge who rendered it can revisit the amount or the installments long after withholding began. A garnishee taken by default may also obtain a reopening “upon proper showing and within the discretion of the court”.
The judgment’s own ten-year clock
“Until the indebtedness is paid” describes the garnishment, not the debt behind it, and the judgment the garnishment enforces has a life of its own. Civil Code article 3501 provides that a money judgment rendered by a Louisiana trial court “is prescribed by the lapse of ten years from its signing if no appeal has been taken, or, if an appeal has been taken, it is prescribed by the lapse of ten years from the time the judgment becomes final”. A judgment from another state, a possession of the United States or a foreign country is barred here by the lapse of ten years from its rendition, and the same article makes it unenforceable in Louisiana regardless if it is already prescribed, time-barred or otherwise dead under the law of the place that rendered it. Ten years is the outer edge of a Louisiana wage seizure — unless the creditor revives.
Revival is a separate filing, not a by-product of the garnishment, and article 3501 sends the creditor to C.C.P. art. 2031 for the mechanism. An interested party may revive a money judgment “at any time before it prescribes” by ex parte motion filed in the court and the suit in which the judgment was rendered, accompanied by the holder and owner’s affidavit that the original judgment has not been satisfied. No citation and no service of the motion are required; the clerk mails notice of the signing of the revival judgment to the debtor at his last known address as shown in the suit record, and the debtor’s route back is a contradictory motion to annul the revival on a showing that the judgment was in fact satisfied before it was signed — with costs and attorney fees shifted to the judgment holder if the debtor proves satisfaction predated the motion. Filing the motion to revive interrupts prescription, a revived judgment draws a fresh ten years under the first paragraph of article 3501, and an interested party “may have a money judgment rendered by a court of this state revived as often as he may desire”. A debtor who watched one garnishment stop has not watched the judgment expire, and a creditor who lets the ten years run without reviving has lost the judgment the writ depends on. The article is at La. Civil Code art. 3501.
Releasing it correctly
R.S. 13:3921(B) closes a gap that causes real disputes. Before releasing or terminating a garnishment because the amounts due have been paid, or because the balance shown in the R.S. 13:3923 statement has been reached, the garnishee or the sheriff, marshal or constable “shall make a reasonable effort to contact the seizing creditor, and obtain the current balance due”. Interest keeps running; the figure printed on a months-old statement of sums due is almost never the payoff figure, and the statute puts the duty to go and ask on the party about to release the seizure.
Read the section itself at La. R.S. 13:3923.
Two Different 180-Day Clocks
They start on different events, they punish different failures, and they are constantly confused.
Louisiana has two separate 180-day rules in wage garnishment. They live in different books — one in the Revised Statutes, one in the Code of Civil Procedure — and a creditor can lose a seizure to either one while watching the other. Nothing else in this page is as easy to get wrong, and no aggregator summary we found distinguishes them.
Clock one: R.S. 13:3923 — 180 days from the end of the job
R.S. 13:3923 provides that “all effects of the seizure by garnishment shall cease upon the termination of employment of the debtor with the garnishee, unless the debtor is reinstated or reemployed within one hundred eighty days after the termination.” So the seizure does not survive the job, but it is not instantly dead either: it sits dormant, and if the same employer takes the debtor back inside 180 days, the existing garnishment resumes without a fresh writ. Past day 180, a rehire is a new employment relationship and the creditor is back to serving a new garnishment. This clock is measured from an event at the employer, which is why a creditor who never learns the debtor was laid off can lose a live seizure without a single filing crossing its desk.
Clock two: C.C.P. art. 2411(B)(2) — 180 days from the answers
The second clock punishes the creditor’s own inaction and it starts much earlier in the case. Article 2411(B)(2) provides that for wage garnishments subject to R.S. 13:3921 et seq., where neither the garnishee nor the judgment debtor files an opposition and the garnishee answers the interrogatories affirmatively as to the debtor’s employment, “and the garnisher fails to obtain a garnishment judgment within one hundred eighty days of the filing of the answers to the interrogatories, all effects of the seizure by garnishment shall automatically cease upon the lapse of the one hundred eightieth day, and the garnisher shall be required to re-serve the garnishee pursuant to R.S. 13:3923 and 3924.” Note what triggers it: not service, not the judgment, but the filing of the answers. Note also what happens — the seizure ends by operation of law, with no motion and no order, and the remedy is to start the service sequence over.
The delay that feeds clock two, and the number most pages get wrong
The garnishee’s answer date is set by C.C.P. art. 2412(D): “The garnishee shall file his sworn answers to the interrogatories within thirty days from the date of service made pursuant to this Article.” Thirty days, not fifteen. A great many secondary summaries — and an earlier version of this page — state fifteen days, which is the deadline from a different section entirely: R.S. 13:3925 gives the seizing creditor fifteen days to oppose an employer’s claim that the employee already owes the employer money. Two different parties, two different acts, two different clocks.
The distinction in one line: R.S. 13:3923’s 180 days is a grace period that can revive a seizure after a job ends. C.C.P. art. 2411(B)(2)’s 180 days is a deadline that destroys a seizure if the creditor has not reduced it to a garnishment judgment. One is measured from the debtor’s last day; the other from the day the employer’s sworn answers were filed.
Primary text: C.C.P. art. 2411 and C.C.P. art. 2412.
First Seizer Primes — Except Support, Which Primes Prior Seizures Too
R.S. 13:3922, 13:3928 and 13:3925: who gets paid when one paycheck is spoken for twice.
A steadily employed debtor with more than one judgment against them produces a queue, and Louisiana resolves the queue in the statute rather than by practice.
The ordinary rule: whoever got there first
R.S. 13:3922 lets the court render a garnishment judgment “with or without a hearing” once competent evidence establishes the earnings or other assets, and once the court is satisfied of the existence of any unsatisfied judgment, writ of garnishment, or sale, transfer or assignment of earnings. If such an act exists, “it shall prime in enforcement any subsequent judgment, writ of garnishment, or sale, transfer, or assignment of earnings, and shall be satisfied out of the nonexempt portion of disposable earnings.” Two points a creditor should take from that. First, priority runs to the earlier act, so the second creditor waits — it does not share. Second, the section expressly contemplates an assignment of earnings as a competing act, not just a judgment: a debtor who assigned wages before the creditor filed may have created a senior claim.
The exception that jumps the queue: R.S. 13:3928
Support is different, and the difference is one word. R.S. 13:3928 provides that in any criminal or civil matter, a judgment, decree, order or sentence of court, or a sale, transfer or assignment of earnings, obliging a person to pay current or past-due support for a child or children — or for a parent of a child where the Department of Children and Family Services is providing support enforcement services to that parent — “shall prime in enforcement any prior or subsequent judgment, decree, order, or sentence of court, or sale, transfer, or assignment of earnings, and shall be satisfied out of the nonexempt portion of disposable earnings.” Prior. A support judgment does not take its place at the back of the line; it goes to the front of a line that already exists. A commercial creditor with a perfected, running, first-in-time Louisiana wage garnishment can be demoted by a support order entered years later, and the demotion is automatic on the face of the section.
The employer’s own claim: R.S. 13:3925
There is a third contender that creditors routinely overlook: the employer. If, answering the interrogatories, the employer pleads that the employee owes it money for amounts other than those specified in R.S. 13:3881, it must make “a full and complete disclosure of the status of such account to the creditor, in writing by certified mail”, showing when the debt was incurred, the exact amount, the credits applied, how it is being liquidated as of the service of the interrogatories, and all other pertinent facts. The seizing creditor then has fifteen days to file an opposition to the court treating the employee-employer debt as liquidated. Failure to oppose “shall be considered a waiver”, and R.S. 13:3925(B) states the intent plainly: “the employer shall be presumed to be one holding a prior garnishment.” Let the fifteen days run and the employer collects itself out of the non-exempt portion first, before the judgment creditor sees anything. R.S. 13:3925(C) caps the whole mechanism: it “shall not grant a preference over the enforcement of child support.”
Sources for this section: R.S. 13:3922, R.S. 13:3928 and R.S. 13:3925. How the whole enforcement sequence fits together, from recording the judgment to the debtor examination, is the subject of our wider Louisiana collection guide.
Wages Are the Only Continuing Garnishment
C.C.P. art. 2411(C), which says so in terms.
Most states leave the continuing-versus-snapshot distinction to be inferred. Louisiana wrote it down. Article 2411(C): “Other than as provided in R.S. 13:3921 et seq. applicable to garnishments of wages, a garnishment shall not be continuing in nature and the garnishee need only respond as to property of the judgment debtor that the garnishee has in his possession or under his control at the time the garnishment interrogatories are served on him.”
That single sentence sets the strategy for a Louisiana file. The wage garnishment is an engine: served once, it runs until the debt is paid. Everything else — a bank account, a receivable, funds held by a third party — is a photograph taken at the instant of service. An account that is empty on the morning of service yields nothing, however much lands in it the following week, and there is no legal basis for asking the bank to keep watching.
When the seizure attaches
Article 2411(B)(1) fixes the moment: “The seizure shall take effect upon service of the petition, citation, interrogatories, and a notice of seizure, as required by Article 2412(A)(1).” All four documents, served by the sheriff on the garnishee. Article 2412(A)(2) adds a duty aimed at the debtor rather than the garnishee: the judgment creditor must send the judgment debtor written notice of the filing of the garnishment petition by mail or electronic means — but the article then says that this notice “shall have no effect on the validity of the seizure”. The obligation is real; its omission does not unwind the seizure.
Two service rules worth knowing before you file
Article 2412(C) requires personal service where the garnishee is an individual, and lets the court order alternative service only where the garnishee “has concealed or absented himself with the purpose of avoiding personal service”. A garnishment aimed at a sole proprietor who employs the debtor is therefore a different service problem from one aimed at a corporation. And Article 2412(B) routes garnishments against executive-branch state employees: for employees paid through the office of statewide uniform payroll of the division of administration, service goes to that office; for all other executive-branch employees, service may be made “only on the secretary of the department employing the debtor or on his designee”. Serving the worksite is not service.
The bank’s safe harbour on the day of service
Article 2411(D) protects the garnishee bank, savings and loan association or credit union that keeps operating normally: it may continue to pay checks and drafts drawn on the debtor’s deposit accounts that are presented in the ordinary course of business on the day the interrogatories are served and on the next business day, without incurring liability to the judgment creditor or anyone else. For a creditor, that is a second, quieter reason the snapshot is smaller than the balance the account showed that morning.
The Small Numbers That Decide Who Pays For It
Three dollars, fifteen dollars, and where each one goes.
Louisiana allocates the administrative cost of a wage garnishment explicitly, in two small figures that appear in no summary of the state’s percentages and that both come out of somebody’s pocket.
The employer’s three dollars per pay period
R.S. 13:3921(C) directs that the court “shall also provide in the judgment for a processing fee of three dollars to be deducted by the employer from the nonexempt income of the employee for each pay period during which the judgment of garnishment is in effect”, and states its purpose: the employer’s costs of complying with the garnishment judgment. Two details matter. It is per pay period, so a weekly payroll generates it roughly four and a third times as often as a monthly one. And it comes out of the non-exempt income — the same pot the creditor is collecting from — not out of the protected 75 percent. R.S. 13:3921(D) adds a wrinkle for public payrolls: where the employee is a state officer or employee, the processing fee is paid into the state treasury and, under Article VII, Section 9 of the Louisiana Constitution, credited to the Bond Security and Redemption Fund.
The creditor’s fifteen dollars up front
R.S. 13:3927 requires a plaintiff applying for a writ of garnishment to deposit fifteen dollars with the clerk of court “as a fee for the attorney for the employer who answers such interrogatories”, which may be charged and collected as other costs. It comes back in two situations: if the garnishee files no answer within the time provided by law, and if the court rules in its discretion that no fee should be charged. And it is a floor rather than a ceiling — “If the court should rule that a fee greater than fifteen dollars should be assessed, the court may fix the amount of such fee, which shall be charged to the costs of the suit.”
What the interrogatories have to ask
R.S. 13:3924 fixes the substance of the questions: whether the defendant is employed, at what rate of pay, how the pay is delivered, and “whether or not there are other judgments or garnishments affecting such wage”. That last question is not a formality; it is how the R.S. 13:3922 priority contest and any R.S. 13:3925 employer claim surface before the court fixes the withholding. R.S. 13:3926 deals separately with an employee working on commission. The class of employee covered is deliberately broad: R.S. 13:3921(A) reaches the “wage, salary, tips reported to the employer, or other income” of a laborer, wage earner, artisan, mechanic, engineer, fireman, carpenter, bricklayer, secretary, bookkeeper, clerk, employee on a commission basis, “or employee of any nature and kind whatever, whether skilled or unskilled”.
Cited above: R.S. 13:3921 and R.S. 13:3927.
What Else Is Exempt From Seizure
R.S. 13:3881(A)(2) through (A)(10), by their own lettering.
Wages are paragraph (1) of a section with ten enacted paragraphs in subsection A. The other nine matter to a creditor deciding whether to chase the paycheck or the property, and Louisiana’s list is idiosyncratic enough that guessing from another state’s schedule will mislead. Counted as the Legislature prints them:
- (A)(2) — property necessary to the exercise of a trade, calling or profession, “limited to the following”: (a) tools, (b) instruments, (c) books, (d) one utility trailer. Subparagraph (e) was repealed by Acts 2014, No. 322, Section 2, so the list is four items, not five, and a source that shows five is stale.
- (A)(3) — the personal servitude of habitation and the usufruct under Article 223 of the Civil Code.
- (A)(4) — the household set, itemised across (a) through (g): clothing, bedding, linen, chinaware, nonsterling silverware, glassware, living-room, bedroom and dining-room furniture, cooking stove, heating and cooling equipment, one noncommercial sewing machine, equipment for required therapy, kitchen utensils, pressing irons, washers, dryers, refrigerators and deep freezers; (b) the family portraits; (c) military accoutrements; (d) musical instruments played or practiced on; (e) poultry, fowl and one cow kept for the family; (f) all dogs, cats and other household pets; and (g) firearms, arms, ammunition and accessories “not exceeding a total maximum value of two thousand five hundred dollars“.
- (A)(5) — wedding or engagement rings worn by either spouse, provided the ring’s value does not exceed five thousand dollars.
- (A)(6) — the federal earned income tax credit and the refundable portion of the child tax credit, except for seizure by the Department of Revenue or for child-support arrears.
- (A)(7) — seven thousand five hundred dollars in equity value for one motor vehicle per household, with equity “based on the NADA retail value for the particular year, make, and model”. The valuation source is written into the statute, which is unusual and worth knowing before anyone argues about a trade-in figure.
- (A)(8) — a second seven thousand five hundred dollars in equity for one vehicle per household substantially modified, equipped or fitted to adapt its use to a disability of the debtor or the debtor’s family.
- (A)(9) — property-insurance proceeds received for damage caused by a gubernatorially declared disaster to an otherwise exempt asset, exempt to the same extent as the underlying asset, provided they are “held separately in an escrow account identified as insurance proceeds paid from the damage of an exempt asset”.
- (A)(10) — consumer stimulus payments received under federal COVID-19 relief legislation, except for seizure of spousal or child support — and expressly not unemployment compensation received by the debtor.
Three provisions outside subsection A change the picture as well. R.S. 13:3881(B)(2) removes the exemption, to the extent of the balance due, from any property on which the debtor voluntarily granted a lien — a financed vehicle is not sheltered by paragraph (7) against the lender that financed it. R.S. 13:3881(D) exempts pensions, tax-deferred arrangements and annuity contracts “from all liability for any debt except alimony and child support”, but D(2) withdraws the exemption from any contribution made less than one calendar year before a bankruptcy filing or before writs of seizure are filed against the arrangement, while treating a transfer between arrangements as not a contribution. And R.S. 13:3881(C) is the one most collection files never think to use: the State of Louisiana “expressly waives any immunity from suit insofar as the garnishment of the nonexempt portion of the wages, salaries, commissions, or other compensation of public officials, whether elected or appointed, public employees, or contractors is concerned”, covering itself, its agencies, boards, commissions, political subdivisions, public corporations and municipal corporations. A debtor on a parish, municipal or state payroll is garnishable.
The largest exemption in the picture is not in R.S. 13:3881 at all, and a creditor pricing the property against the paycheck has to read it separately. R.S. 20:1, in Title 20, makes the bona fide homestead — the residence the owner occupies, the land it sits on with its buildings and appurtenances, and contiguous tracts up to five acres inside a municipality or up to two hundred acres outside one — “exempt from seizure and sale under any writ, mandate, or process whatsoever”. That shelter is capped rather than absolute: it “extends to thirty-five thousand dollars in value of the homestead”, except for obligations arising directly as a result of a catastrophic or terminal illness or injury, where it applies to the full value of the homestead based on its value one year before the seizure. The statute defines that phrase instead of leaving it to argument — uninsured obligations to health care providers of more than ten thousand dollars which are also greater than fifty percent of the debtor’s annual adjusted gross income, averaged across the three preceding federal returns. Disaster insurance proceeds follow the homestead into an identified escrow account on the same structure paragraph (A)(9) uses for exempt movables.
Subsection C then lifts the exemption for eight categories of debt, including the purchase price of the property, labor, money and material furnished to build, repair or improve it, taxes or assessments, rent bearing a privilege on the property, sums due on a mortgage or a homestead-association loan secured by the property, and any obligation arising from a felony or misdemeanor conviction carrying the possibility of at least six months’ imprisonment. Subsection D allows the exemption to be waived in whole or in part by a written waiver recorded in the parish mortgage records, ineffective without the other spouse’s signature where the owner is married and not separated from bed and board, unless the homestead is that spouse’s separate property — and a waiver “shall not be required or permitted for the rendering of medical treatment, medical services, or hospitalization”, which is the same policy the catastrophic-illness carve-out expresses from the other direction. Read it at La. R.S. 20:1.
R.S. 13:3881(B)(1) is also the clause that makes Louisiana a bankruptcy opt-out state, limiting a debtor’s exemptions in a Title 11 case to Louisiana law and federal law other than 11 U.S.C. 522(d) — that is the subject of our Louisiana bankruptcy exemptions page, which answers what a debtor keeps in a bankruptcy case. This page and our Louisiana asset exemptions page answer the different question of what a judgment creditor can reach outside bankruptcy, the latter dealing with property while this one deals with the paycheck. For the same comparison across other states, see our wage garnishment laws by state overview.
Community Property and the Spouse Who Owes Nothing
La. Civil Code arts. 2325 et seq. — and the single article that settles it.
Louisiana is a community-property state, and that changes the target list in a way none of the exemption schedules above capture. A matrimonial regime, Civil Code article 2325 says, is “a system of principles and rules governing the ownership and management of the property of married persons as between themselves and toward third persons” — and a judgment creditor is a third person. Article 2334 makes the legal regime of community of acquets and gains the default for “spouses domiciled in this state, regardless of their domicile at the time of marriage or the place of celebration of the marriage”, so a couple who married in Texas and later moved to Shreveport are inside it unless they contracted out of it.
Article 2338 then classifies the paycheck. Community property “comprises: property acquired during the existence of the legal regime through the effort, skill, or industry of either spouse”, along with property acquired with community things, property donated to the spouses jointly, the fruits of community property, and everything else not classified by law as separate. Wages earned during the regime are community — the debtor’s, and equally those of a spouse who owes the creditor nothing.
The article that decides it: C.C. art. 2345
Article 2345 is one sentence and it is the whole answer for the life of the regime: “A separate or community obligation may be satisfied during the community property regime from community property and from the separate property of the spouse who incurred the obligation.” Read it slowly. Community property answers for both kinds of obligation. Whether the debt was one spouse’s alone or the couple’s together, community assets are exposed while the regime lasts; what the characterisation changes is whose separate property is additionally on the hook, and the answer there is only the spouse who incurred it. The non-debtor spouse’s separate property stays out of reach. The community does not.
That inverts the usual assumption, and it inverts what several Louisiana summaries say. A page that tells you the creditor “has to work out whether the debt is community or separate, because that decides whether community assets can be reached” has article 2345 backwards: community property is reachable either way, during the regime.
What the characterisation actually decides
Three things — none of them the availability of community property while the regime is running.
- Whose separate property is exposed. Article 2360 makes an obligation incurred during the regime “for the common interest of the spouses or for the interest of the other spouse” a community obligation. Article 2363 makes it separate if it was incurred before the regime, or during it “though not for the common interest of the spouses or for the interest of the other spouse”, and likewise for an obligation resulting from an intentional wrong, or incurred for a spouse’s separate property, to the extent it does not benefit both spouses, the family, or the other spouse. Article 2361 supplies the presumption a creditor argues from: except as provided in article 2363, “all obligations incurred by a spouse during the existence of a community property regime are presumed to be community obligations.”
- A reimbursement claim that runs between the spouses, not against the creditor. Article 2364: where community property has been used during the regime to satisfy a separate obligation, “the other spouse is entitled to reimbursement for one-half of the amount or value that the property had at the time it was used.” That is a claim one spouse holds against the other. It is not a defence to the seizure and it does not put the money back.
- What survives the end of the regime. Article 2357 keeps the exposure alive: an obligation incurred before or during the regime “may be satisfied after termination of the regime from the property of the former community and from the separate property of the spouse who incurred the obligation.” A spouse who disposes of former community property for a purpose other than satisfying community obligations “is liable for all obligations incurred by the other spouse up to the value of that community property”, and a spouse may by written act assume responsibility for one-half of each community obligation the other incurred, which caps that exposure on disposal. A divorce does not clear the field.
Who has to be sued: C.C.P. art. 735
The substantive rule is only half of it. Procedure decides whether a particular judgment actually reaches community property, and Code of Civil Procedure article 735 is where that is written. “Either spouse is the proper defendant, during the existence of the marital community, in an action to enforce an obligation against community property” — except that where one spouse is the managing spouse with respect to the obligation sought to be enforced, that spouse is the proper defendant. Where there is doubt whether the obligation is a community obligation or the defendant spouse’s separate one, “that spouse may be sued in the alternative”. And then the sentence a creditor should read twice: “When only one spouse is sued to enforce an obligation against community property, the other spouse is a necessary party“, with the trial court empowered to order joinder on its own motion where the failure to join may result in an injustice to that spouse.
The part we will not assert
Whether a creditor holding a judgment against one spouse alone can cite the other spouse’s employer as garnishee under R.S. 13:3921 et seq. is not answered on the face of the provisions above, and this page does not assert it either way. Article 2345 makes community property answerable and article 2338 makes the non-debtor spouse’s wages community; Part II of Title 13 is written around a garnishment proceeding aimed at the judgment debtor’s compensation; and article 735 treats the unsued spouse as a necessary party rather than a stranger. Those provisions point somewhere without closing the question, and the answer in a given file turns on what the judgment says and who was actually before the court. That is a question for Louisiana counsel and the record, not for a summary page — and any page that gives you a flat yes or a flat no on it is telling you more than the statutes do.
One community wrinkle inside the homestead exemption
R.S. 20:1(B) carries a provision worth knowing on a file where the marriage has broken up but the house has not been sold: the homestead exemption “shall continue to apply to a homestead otherwise eligible while owned in indivision by the spouses, and occupied by either of them, when the community property regime of which the homestead is a part is dissolved by judgment which so provides”, and if either spouse later becomes the sole owner and keeps occupying it, “the exemption as to that spouse shall be deemed to have continued uninterrupted.” A creditor timing a seizure to the dissolution of the community, on the theory that the shelter lapses with the regime, is timing it to nothing.
Primary text for this section: La. C.C. art. 2345 and La. C.C.P. art. 735. Articles 2325, 2334, 2338, 2341, 2357, 2360, 2361, 2363 and 2364 were read from the Legislature’s own print of Title VI of Book III of the Civil Code.
Where Louisiana Garnishments Go Wrong
Six failures that cost creditors a live seizure.
Reading 50 Percent as Protection
R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a) states exemptions. The fifty-percent figure for child support is the exemption, so fifty percent is reachable. Treating it as a cap understates the withholding on the highest-priority obligation in the section.
Missing the Article 2411(B)(2) Deadline
The 180 days run from the filing of the employer’s answers, not from service and not from the judgment. Lapse it and the seizure ceases automatically on the 180th day, with re-service under R.S. 13:3923 and 3924 the only route back.
Confusing the Two 180-Day Rules
R.S. 13:3923’s window revives a dormant seizure if the debtor is rehired by the same employer. Article 2411(B)(2)’s window destroys a seizure the creditor never reduced to judgment. Watching one does not protect against the other.
Expecting a Bank Garnishment to Keep Working
Article 2411(C) limits every non-wage garnishee to what it holds when the interrogatories are served, and Article 2411(D) lets the bank keep honouring checks presented that day and the next. The snapshot is smaller than the morning balance.
Assuming First in Time Is Safe
R.S. 13:3922 protects the first seizer against anything subsequent, but R.S. 13:3928 lets a support judgment prime “any prior or subsequent” claim. A perfected commercial garnishment can be demoted by a later support order.
Letting the Employer’s Fifteen Days Run
When an employer answers that the employee already owes it money, R.S. 13:3925 gives the seizing creditor fifteen days to oppose. Silence is a waiver, and the employer is then presumed to hold a prior garnishment and collects first.
What We Are Asked To Find in Louisiana
The factual inputs each step of the seizure sequence needs.
The Current Garnishee
Who signs the paycheck today
Public-Payroll Status
For an R.S. 13:3881(C) garnishee
Deposit Relationships
To time a one-shot seizure
Sole-Proprietor Employers
Article 2412(C) needs personal service
Immovable Property
Parish records for the asset side
Re-Employment Signals
Inside the R.S. 13:3923 window Each of those inputs is researched for one purpose and one only: enforcing a Louisiana money judgment that already exists. That work is public-records research and it is not a consumer report. People Locator Skip Tracing is not a consumer reporting agency, and nothing in a Louisiana garnishee file – not the employer identified for service under article 2412, not the deposit relationship, not the re-employment signal inside the R.S. 13:3923 window – may be used to decide a tenancy, an offer of employment, or eligibility for credit or insurance. Those are Fair Credit Reporting Act decisions; a request framed that way is referred to an FCRA-regulated provider rather than opened as a seizure file here. The Louisiana Sequence, Step by Step Where each statutory clock starts.
Identify the Garnishee, Not Just the Employer
Article 2412 decides how service must be made: personally on an individual garnishee, on the office of statewide uniform payroll or the department secretary for executive-branch state employees, and in the ordinary way on a corporation. Getting this wrong is a service defect, not a delay.
Serve the Full Packet and the Statement of Sums Due
R.S. 13:3923 requires the citation, petition, interrogatories, notice of seizure and a statement of sums due including principal, interest, costs to date and attorney fees. Article 2411(B)(1) makes the seizure take effect on that service.
Calendar Thirty Days, Then One Hundred Eighty
The garnishee answers within thirty days under Article 2412(D). From the filing of those answers, Article 2411(B)(2) gives the garnisher 180 days to obtain the garnishment judgment or the seizure ceases by operation of law.
Take the Judgment, Then Watch the Employment
The judgment fixes the payment rhythm and runs until the debt is paid, subject to the court’s retained power to amend or set it aside. If the job ends, R.S. 13:3923 gives a 180-day reinstatement window before a new garnishment is needed.
Can Specific Creditors Garnish Wages in Louisiana?
One statute, answered for the debts people actually ask about.
Can credit card companies garnish wages in Louisiana?
Yes, once the issuer holds a Louisiana money judgment. It is an ordinary judgment, so the ordinary limb of R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a) governs: seventy-five percent of disposable earnings is exempt, twenty-five percent is reachable, subject to the floor of thirty times the federal minimum hourly wage prorated to the pay period. The issuer takes a writ of fieri facias, files the garnishment petition and interrogatories, and under R.S. 13:3923 that one set supports a judgment that runs “until the indebtedness is paid” with no re-filing each pay period. Both clocks set out above apply to it in full: thirty days for the employer’s answer under C.C.P. art. 2412(D), then 180 days from the filing of those answers to take the garnishment judgment or the seizure ceases by operation of law.
Can hospitals or medical creditors garnish wages in Louisiana?
Yes with a judgment, at the same twenty-five percent — and in Louisiana that matters more to a medical creditor than to most, because the house may be closed to it. R.S. 20:1(A)(2) caps the homestead exemption at $35,000 in value “except in the case of obligations arising directly as a result of a catastrophic or terminal illness or injury, in which case the exemption shall apply to the full value of the homestead based upon its value one year before such seizure”. The statute defines the phrase rather than leaving it to argument: uninsured obligations to health care providers of more than $10,000 which are also greater than fifty percent of the debtor’s annual adjusted gross income, averaged across the three preceding federal returns. A large uninsured hospital bill is precisely the debt that trips that definition, so the creditor best placed to hold one is also the creditor most likely to find the homestead fully exempt against it — which pushes it back onto the paycheck and onto non-exempt movables. The wage figure itself does not move.
Can a personal loan or payday lender garnish wages in Louisiana?
Yes after a judgment, on the same twenty-five percent and through the same seizure procedure. Nothing in Part II of Title 13 gives a consumer lender a shortcut around the judgment. Where a secured lender does gain ground is on the asset side: R.S. 13:3881(B)(2) withdraws the exemption, to the extent of the balance due, from any property over which the debtor voluntarily granted a lien, so a financed vehicle is not sheltered from its own lender by the $7,500 equity exemption in (A)(7). An unsecured signature or deferred-presentment loan gets no such help and is left with the wage seizure and whatever non-exempt property an asset search turns up.
Can a debt collector or debt buyer garnish wages in Louisiana?
Yes with a judgment, and it is the same judgment on the same terms — an assignee is subject to the same twenty-five percent, the same interrogatories and the same deadlines. Two Louisiana features bite a portfolio buyer harder than an original creditor. First, the judgment has to still be alive: a Louisiana money judgment prescribes ten years under Civil Code article 3501 and revival is a separate action, so a bought judgment nobody revived is not a collectable judgment however the file is priced. Second, priority runs by act, not by acquisition. R.S. 13:3922 gives the first seizer priority over anything subsequent, so a buyer arriving late on a debtor who is already garnished stands behind the existing writ, and R.S. 13:3928 lets a support judgment prime “any prior or subsequent” claim regardless. Buying the paper does not buy a place in the queue.
Can a Louisiana bank account be garnished instead of wages?
Yes, but it is a different instrument doing a different job, and the difference is written into the code rather than left to inference. C.C.P. art. 2411(C) provides that other than a wage garnishment under R.S. 13:3921 et seq., “a garnishment shall not be continuing in nature”, and the garnishee answers only as to property it held when the interrogatories were served. A bank seizure is a photograph; the wage seizure is an engine. Article 2411(D) narrows the photograph further by letting the bank keep honouring checks and drafts presented in the ordinary course on the day of service and the next business day without liability. The two are ordinarily used together rather than as alternatives: the wage garnishment for the steady withholding, a bank seizure timed to a known deposit for a lump.
Can wages be garnished without a court judgment in Louisiana?
For an ordinary creditor, essentially no — but the statute is more careful than the usual summary. R.S. 13:3921(A) speaks of wages garnished “either under attachment or fieri facias or as otherwise provided by law”. Fieri facias is the post-judgment writ. Attachment is a conservatory writ available before judgment, and only on the five grounds C.C.P. art. 3541 lists: the defendant has concealed himself to avoid service of citation; has mortgaged, assigned or disposed of property, or is about to, with intent to defraud creditors or prefer one of them; has converted or is about to convert property into money or evidences of debt to place it beyond creditors’ reach; has left the state permanently or is about to before a judgment can be obtained and executed; or is a nonresident with no duly appointed agent for service here. Those are narrow and they are not the ordinary consumer file, but “you always need a final judgment first” is not quite what Part II says.
The genuine no-judgment wage garnishments are federal, and they override state procedure by their own terms. For a defaulted federal student loan, a guaranty agency or the Secretary of Education may garnish disposable pay “notwithstanding any provision of State law”, capped at fifteen percent of disposable pay unless the borrower consents in writing, and conditioned on thirty days’ prior written notice, an opportunity to inspect the records, an opportunity to agree a repayment schedule and an opportunity for a hearing (20 U.S.C. 1095a). The IRS levies rather than garnishes: under 26 U.S.C. 6331(a) the Secretary may collect by levy where a person liable neglects or refuses to pay within ten days after notice and demand, and 6331(e) makes a levy on salary or wages “continuous from the date such levy is first made until such levy is released”. A levy is not expressed as a percentage at all — 26 U.S.C. 6334(d) exempts a computed weekly figure derived from the standard deduction and personal exemptions, which is why a federal levy can take a far larger share of a paycheck than any Louisiana writ. Support obligations are the other exception, and they run on their own enforcement machinery and on the fifty and forty percent limbs of R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a) rather than the ordinary twenty-five; Louisiana’s income-assignment procedure sits outside Title 13 and outside the scope of this page.
Federal text cited above: 20 U.S.C. 1095a and 26 U.S.C. 6331. What Is Not Done on a Louisiana Garnishment File Three limits sit on this work and none of them bends for a creditor. People Locator Skip Tracing is not a licensed private investigation agency and holds no Louisiana private investigator license, so a garnishee is identified from records and permissible-purpose data rather than by surveillance or any covert assignment. Nobody researching a file misrepresents who is asking or why: there is no pretexting, no posing as a payroll clerk, a lender, a relative or a parish official, and no approach to the debtor’s employer under a false identity. And where the person to be located appears to have left a household because of abuse, or is protected by a Louisiana protective order, the request is declined rather than worked, whatever judgment stands behind it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Louisiana wage garnishment, answered from the statute.
Does Louisiana protect 50 percent of wages from a child support garnishment?
No, and this is the most common Louisiana misreading. R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a) is a list of exemptions, not caps. The fifty percent is the exemption for a current or past-due child support obligation, so fifty percent of disposable earnings is reachable. For spousal support the exemption is sixty percent, leaving forty percent reachable.
How much can an ordinary creditor garnish in Louisiana?
Twenty-five percent of disposable earnings, because R.S. 13:3881(A)(1)(a) exempts seventy-five percent. The statute adds a floor expressed as thirty times the federal minimum hourly wage in effect when the earnings are payable, prorated up or down where the pay period is longer or shorter than a week.
What are the two 180-day rules in Louisiana garnishment?
R.S. 13:3923 says the seizure ceases when the debtor’s employment ends unless the debtor is reinstated or reemployed within 180 days of the termination. C.C.P. art. 2411(B)(2) says that if the garnisher fails to obtain a garnishment judgment within 180 days of the filing of the answers to the interrogatories, the seizure automatically ceases on the 180th day and the garnishee must be re-served.
How long does a Louisiana employer have to answer garnishment interrogatories?
Thirty days from the date of service, under C.C.P. art. 2412(D). The fifteen-day figure that circulates widely belongs to a different provision: R.S. 13:3925 gives the seizing creditor fifteen days to oppose an employer’s claim that the employee already owes the employer money.
Is a Louisiana bank garnishment continuing?
No. C.C.P. art. 2411(C) provides that other than wage garnishments under R.S. 13:3921 et seq., a garnishment is not continuing in nature and the garnishee responds only as to property held when the interrogatories are served. Article 2411(D) also lets a bank keep paying checks presented in the ordinary course that day and the next business day.
Who gets paid first when two Louisiana garnishments hit one paycheck?
Ordinarily the earlier act: R.S. 13:3922 provides that an existing judgment, writ of garnishment, or sale, transfer or assignment of earnings primes any subsequent one. Support is the exception. R.S. 13:3928 lets a support judgment prime any prior or subsequent claim, so it moves to the front of a queue that already exists.
What does a Louisiana wage garnishment cost the employer and the creditor?
R.S. 13:3921(C) gives the employer a three-dollar processing fee for each pay period the garnishment judgment is in effect, deducted from the employee’s non-exempt income. R.S. 13:3927 requires the plaintiff to deposit fifteen dollars with the clerk as a fee for the employer’s attorney, refundable if no answer is filed or if the court rules no fee is due.
Can a Louisiana public employee’s wages be garnished?
Yes. R.S. 13:3881(C) expressly waives the state’s immunity from suit for garnishment of the non-exempt portion of the wages, salaries, commissions or other compensation of public officials, whether elected or appointed, public employees and contractors, on behalf of the state, its agencies, boards, commissions, political subdivisions, public corporations and municipal corporations.
Find the Garnishee Before the Clock Starts
Every deadline on this page starts with something the employer does. The garnishee’s thirty-day answer under article 2412(D) sets the 180-day judgment clock running; the last day of the job sets the other one running. A seizure pointed at a payroll the debtor has already left is a filing fee spent on nothing. Tell us what you have on the debtor and our research team identifies the garnishee to cite, the deposit relationship a one-shot seizure should be timed to, and the parish where any immovable property sits — documentary work, opened under a stated permissible purpose, usually back inside 24 hours. Contact us to begin, or read what our skip tracing services cover.
Order a Debtor Locate →
