Michigan Wage Garnishment Laws

For years, a Michigan periodic wage-garnishment writ was good for only one hundred eighty-two days, and that is not folklore — it is the pre-amendment statutory text. 2012 PA 304, section 4012(1), read: “A writ of garnishment of wages, salary, commissions, or other earnings remains in effect for 182 days.” When it lapsed, the creditor filed a brand-new writ, paid the fee again, and served the employer all over again — an expensive, repetitive grind on any sizable judgment.

The 2015 amendment to MCL 600.4012 (2015 PA 14, immediate effect April 14, 2015) replaced that sentence outright. The current subsection (1) reads: “A garnishment of periodic payments remains in effect until the balance of the judgment is satisfied.” The enacting section fixes the cutover precisely — the amendment “applies to a writ of garnishment issued after September 30, 2015” — so the issue date on the face of your writ, not the date of the judgment, is what decides which regime governs it. The same act raised the garnishee fee from $6.00 (2012 PA 304, section 4012(3)) to the $35.00 now set by MCL 600.4012(12).

That continuing writ is a meaningful advantage if you can keep it attached to the right payroll — but it cuts the other way too. A writ tied to a job the debtor left months ago keeps no money flowing; it just sits dormant against an employer who no longer cuts that person a check. The statute also added standing duties for the creditor. Under MCL 600.4012(5)(a) you must give the employer and the debtor a balance statement at least every six months while the garnishment runs, and under MCL 600.4012(5)(b) you must deliver a release of garnishment — SCAO form MC 50 — within twenty-one days after the judgment is paid in full. Neither duty is optional and the six-month statement carries a consequence most creditors never anticipate, set out further down this page: every statement you send restarts the debtor’s clock to object.

Unlike a handful of states that ban or sharply restrict wage garnishment, Michigan permits it and has never legislated a percentage of its own. The Michigan Court Rules simply point outward: MCR 3.101(G)(1)(f) makes the garnishee liable for “the portion of the defendant’s earnings that are not protected from garnishment by law (see, e.g., 15 USC 1673),” and MCR 3.101(B)(1)(c) uses the identical cross-reference. Under 15 U.S.C. 1673, an ordinary creditor garnishment cannot exceed twenty-five percent of the debtor’s disposable earnings for the week, or the amount by which those disposable earnings exceed thirty times the federal minimum wage, whichever is smaller — a test the federal regulation states as three bands rather than as a “lesser of” rule, with its upper edge at forty times the minimum wage, $290 of weekly disposable pay, above which the twenty-five percent prong always controls. Disposable earnings means pay left after legally required deductions such as taxes and Social Security — not after voluntary deductions like a retirement contribution.

Two consequences follow that matter in Michigan collection. First, a debtor whose weekly disposable pay is at or below thirty times the federal minimum wage has nothing garnishable from an ordinary writ, which is why low earners are effectively shielded. Second, several categories of debt sit outside this statute entirely, and Michigan says so in its own words rather than leaving you to infer it from federal law: MCL 600.4012(13) provides that section 4012 does not apply to an order of income withholding for support, to a levy by the State of Michigan or a Michigan governmental unit to satisfy a tax liability, or to a levy under the Michigan Employment Security Act. If your matter is an ordinary civil money judgment — a credit-card balance, a medical bill, a personal loan, a deficiency, an unpaid commercial lease — you are on the periodic-writ track described throughout this page, and the debtor may assert applicable exemptions through the objection process.

The two-part test, worked through

The cap is a comparison, not a flat percentage, so it helps to walk a few weekly paychecks through both halves of the test and take whichever produces the smaller number. The federal floor — thirty times the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour — is $217.50 of weekly disposable earnings that an ordinary garnishment can never touch.

Take a worker with $200 of weekly disposable pay. Twenty-five percent would be $50, but the amount above the floor is zero because the whole check sits under $217.50 — so nothing is garnishable. At $400 of disposable pay, twenty-five percent is $100 while the amount over the floor is about $182 and fifty cents; the lesser is $100, so a hundred dollars comes out. At $600, twenty-five percent is $150 and the over-floor figure is far larger, so the creditor takes $150. At $800 of disposable pay, twenty-five percent is $200 and that is again the smaller of the two, so $200 is withheld. The pattern is consistent for any reasonably-paid worker: once disposable pay clears a few hundred dollars a week, the twenty-five-percent prong almost always controls, and the over-the-floor prong only bites for the lowest earners. Support orders are the conspicuous exception, and they reach considerably further — but the operative Michigan authority for that is MCL 600.4012(13)(a), which takes income-withholding orders out of this section altogether, not the percentage arithmetic. Those figures belong to the federal scheme and are set out on our wage-garnishment hub.

Two orders, one paycheck: who collects the gap

Most sources answer this by saying that in Michigan whoever serves first takes the paycheck. That is not the rule. MCL 600.4012(2) starts there — garnishments “have priority in the order in which they are received” — and then names two orders that ignore the queue entirely: “Both of the following have priority over a garnishment, regardless of the order in which they are received: (a) An order of income withholding as that term is defined in section 2 of the support and parenting time enforcement act, 1982 PA 295, MCL 552.602. (b) A levy of this state or a governmental unit of this state to satisfy a tax liability.” A support income-withholding order or a Michigan tax levy served next year outranks your writ served today. Being first buys you nothing against either.

The second half is the part almost nobody has, and it decides real money. A senior order does not lock the paycheck — it only protects the garnishee “to the extent that” the garnishee must satisfy it. MCR 3.101(B)(1)(c) spells out what that means for earnings: while a higher-priority order is in effect the garnishee need not withhold on the lower-priority writ, “However, in the case of garnishment of earnings, the garnishee shall withhold pursuant to the lower priority writ to the extent that the amount being withheld pursuant to the higher priority order is less than the maximum that could be withheld by law pursuant to the lower priority writ (see, e.g., 15 USC 1673).”

Read that with the cap and the arithmetic is straightforward. If a support income-withholding order is taking fifteen percent of a debtor’s disposable earnings and the federal ceiling for your ordinary civil writ is twenty-five percent, the employer shall withhold the remaining ten points on your writ — now, this pay period, not after the support order ends. A junior Michigan writ is not a place in a queue; it is a claim on whatever headroom the senior order leaves under the cap. If the senior order is already withholding the maximum, you collect nothing, and MCR 3.101(K)(2)(d) gives the debtor that as an express objection ground. When the senior writ expires, MCR 3.101(B)(1)(c) makes the junior one effective automatically.

Michigan also tells you where you stand without your having to guess. MCR 3.101(H)(2)(c) requires the garnishee’s disclosure to identify any higher-priority writ or order by issuing court, file number, date of issue and date of service, and the rule obliges the garnishee to notify the plaintiff when a higher-priority writ arrives later. So the fourteen-day disclosure that comes back is not just a yes-or-no on employment: it names the creditor ahead of you and dates their claim. Separately, MCR 3.101(B)(1)(b) bars a plaintiff from obtaining a second writ against the same garnishee while a prior writ on the same judgment is still in effect — one writ per employer per judgment, no stacking your own.

Combined with the post-2015 rule that a wage writ now runs until paid, this makes the debtor’s current employer the scarce resource in Michigan collection. Priority is measured from the date a writ is received by the right garnishee; a writ served on last year’s employer establishes nothing against anyone.

Ten years to collect — unless it came from small claims

A Michigan judgment does not have to be enforced overnight. MCL 600.5809(3) sets the period of limitations at ten years for an action founded on a judgment or decree “rendered in a court of record,” and permits an action within that period to obtain a new judgment — the renewal that gives a patient creditor a second decade for a continuing writ to grind a balance down. The same subsection carries a carve-out creditors miss until it costs them the file: the period is only six years for a judgment of a court not of record, which in Michigan includes the small claims division of the district court, and it also captures district court judgments entered before May 25, 1973. A small-claims judgment is not on the ten-year clock, and a writ served in year seven on that judgment is a writ on a stale right.

That is the clock on enforcing a judgment you already hold. How long the underlying claim stays actionable before anyone sues on it is a separate limitation question with its own periods, and it is worth settling before you spend money renewing a judgment on an old account.

When the employer ignores the writ — and what chasing it is worth

A garnishee that fails to file its disclosure is not an automatic default in Michigan. Under MCL 600.4012(6)(b) the creditor must first serve the garnishee a notice of failure and give it twenty-eight days to cure by filing the missing disclosure and certifying that it will immediately begin withholding. Only if the employer still does nothing does it expose itself to a default judgment for the balance. That much is widely known. What follows is not, and it changes the calculation.

MCL 600.4012(10)(a) caps the recovery. If the garnishee moves within twenty-one days, certifies that the failure was “inadvertent or caused by an administrative error, mistake, or other oversight” and that it will begin withholding, the court shall reduce the default judgment “to not more than the amount that would have been withheld if the garnishment had been in effect for 56 days.” MCL 600.4012(10)(b) requires the default to be set aside altogether where the garnishee owed the defendant no periodic payments after service, where service was defective, or where the notice of failure itself was materially inaccurate or incomplete.

And whatever the employer does pay, it takes back off the employee. MCL 408.477(5), amended by 2015 PA 15 alongside the garnishment reforms, lets an employer that satisfies a garnishee default judgment deduct that amount from the employee’s wages without the employee’s written consent, limited to fifteen percent of the gross wages earned in the pay period and never below the greater of the Michigan or federal minimum wage. The one figure that runs the creditor’s way is MCR 3.101(S)(3), under which costs awarded against a defaulting garnishee “shall include reasonable attorney fees and shall not be less than $100.”

Put together: a fully litigated garnishee default is worth at most fifty-six days of withholding once the employer cures, plus costs from a hundred dollars up, against weeks of motion practice — and it lands on a payroll department that will simply recoup it from the debtor at fifteen percent a period. Against a genuinely unresponsive employer it is a real remedy. Against an employer that is unresponsive because the debtor does not work there, it is the most expensive way in Michigan to discover you served the wrong company.

Most pages assert that knowing the employer matters. In Michigan you do not have to take it on assertion, because the legislature wrote the requirement into the writ itself. MCL 600.4011(10): “A writ of garnishment is not effective if both of the following conditions are met: (a) The plaintiff fails to provide the garnishee with information sufficient for the garnishee to identify the defendant. (b) The garnishee provides the court with written notice of the insufficiency.” Not merely unproductive — not effective, by statute, on the garnishee’s say-so. MCR 3.101(E)(1) sets out what “sufficient” looks like: the writ must carry information permitting the garnishee to identify the defendant, “such as the defendant’s address, social security number, employee identification number, federal tax identification number, employer number, or account number, if known,” and the MC 12 form carries those fields on its face.

Michigan then prices the mistake. Under MCR 3.101(R)(2), within twenty-eight days after receiving a disclosure showing that the garnishee does not employ the defendant, the plaintiff “shall deduct any costs associated with that garnishment that may have been added to the judgment balance” under MCR 2.625(L). Serving the wrong employer does not simply fail; it obliges you to strip the cost of the attempt back off the judgment. And under MCR 3.101(J)(6), once the writ ceases to be effective the employer must file a final statement of the total paid within fourteen days “regardless of changes in employment status during the time that the writ was in effect” — so the paper trail closes whether or not anyone told you the debtor had left.

The statute hands you a writ that can run until the judgment is paid, sets every deadline and fee, and defines the cap — and then assumes you already know which payroll to serve. By the time a judgment is enforceable, the employment information in the case file is often years old, and a continuing writ aimed at a former employer is a continuing writ that collects nothing.

That is the gap a public-records research firm fills. We are not attorneys and we do not file your writ; we locate the debtor’s current employer for a wage garnishment so the writ you file lands on a live payroll and satisfies MCL 600.4011(10) on its face. The same employment-tracing work supports broader recovery through professional skip tracing, and our guide on how to find someone’s current employer walks through the lawful sources behind it. If your matter reaches across state lines, our overview of wage garnishment laws by state helps you compare Michigan’s continuing periodic writ against the rules where the debtor now earns. For a legitimate, judgment-backed collection matter, a verified employer locate typically comes back within 24 hours.

It fills that gap and no other. The firm is not a consumer reporting agency and a payroll locate is not a consumer report, so it cannot be used to screen anyone for a job, a tenancy, credit, or insurance. Our researchers never pretext: nobody here calls a Michigan payroll department, a district court clerk, or the debtor under a false identity or a pretended entitlement to the answer, and we do not impersonate a party, a creditor, or a public official to shorten a search. Where a Michigan request looks like an effort to reach someone through domestic violence, stalking, or harassment rather than to serve a periodic writ, we decline it at intake.