Judgment Collection by State

The federal floor is the one constant. Under 15 U.S.C. 1673, the Consumer Credit Protection Act caps ordinary wage garnishment at the lesser of twenty-five percent of disposable earnings or the amount by which weekly disposable earnings exceed thirty times the federal minimum wage. That ceiling applies nationwide, but it is only a ceiling. States are free to protect debtors more aggressively, and many do, so the real rules live in state law.

Wage garnishment can be off the table entirely

A small group of states bar or sharply restrict wage garnishment for ordinary consumer debts. Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and South Carolina are the headline examples, and several other jurisdictions are strongly protective of wages. In those states, the steady workhorse of collection simply is not available for most judgments, which pushes the entire strategy toward bank levies, liens, and locating non-wage assets. Knowing this before you spend money on a garnishment that will bounce is the difference between a plan and a guess.

Homestead protection swings from total to near-zero

The judgment lien is only as good as the equity it can attach to, and that depends on the state’s homestead exemption. At one extreme, states like Florida and Texas protect a primary residence almost without limit, so a lien on the home may recover nothing. At the other, states such as Delaware and New Jersey offer little or no homestead shelter, leaving real estate squarely exposed. Same lien, opposite outcome, decided entirely by the debtor’s address.

Judgments do not live forever, and the lifespan varies

Every judgment has an enforceable life, after which it must be renewed or it dies. Those lifespans differ widely from one state to the next, and the renewal procedure and deadline differ too. Miss the window and a fully valid judgment becomes uncollectible, which is why renewal is a fixed step in the playbook rather than an afterthought. Two jurisdictions run on a civil-law tradition rather than the common law: Louisiana, the only state to do so, and Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory rather than a state. In both, the terminology and the procedure look different from the rest of the country.

The Four Wage-Protection States, Precisely

Search for the states that block wage garnishment and almost every answer returns the same four names with the same flat sentence. Read at the statute, those four states are not running one rule; they are running at least three, and the differences decide whether a garnishment is worth attempting.

South Carolina is the clean bar. S.C. Code Section 15-39-410 lets a judge order any non-exempt property of the debtor applied to the judgment, “except that the earnings of the debtor for his personal services cannot be so applied.” No conditions, no dollar threshold, no dependants test. Nothing in that sentence gives an ordinary creditor a route back in.

North Carolina’s protection is conditional, and the condition is written into the text. N.C.G.S. Section 1-362 protects the debtor’s earnings for personal services earned within the sixty days preceding the order, and only where it appears that those earnings “are necessary for the use of a family supported wholly or partly by his labor.” Two limits sit inside that clause: a sixty-day window, and a family-support requirement. Neither is mentioned in the summaries that lump North Carolina in with South Carolina.

Pennsylvania has a carve-out that this page’s own audience sits inside. 42 Pa.C.S. Section 8127(a) exempts wages, salaries and commissions “while in the hands of the employer” from attachment or execution, but it then lists proceedings the exemption does not cover, including divorce, support, board for four weeks or less, and, at subsection (a)(3.1), amounts awarded to a judgment creditor-landlord arising out of a residential lease on which the court has entered a final judgment. A Pennsylvania landlord holding a final residential-lease judgment is therefore in a materially different position from a Pennsylvania credit-card creditor holding the same dollar amount. If you are a landlord who read that Pennsylvania bars wage garnishment and closed the file, the statute says to reopen it and take the question to counsel.

Texas protects wages at the constitutional level rather than by statute, which is why the protection does not move the way an ordinary exemption statute can move with a legislative session. That is a structural point about durability, not a difference in day-to-day effect.

New York’s ten percent is a general ceiling, not a low-income rule. Under CPLR Section 5231(b), where a judgment debtor is receiving or will receive money from any source, an income execution may be issued for installments of “not more than ten percent thereof” — and that cap runs at every income level, not only at the bottom of the scale. Two further limits sit underneath it. No amount may be withheld from earnings for any week unless the debtor’s disposable earnings for that week exceed thirty times the greater of the federal or the New York minimum hourly wage; and the amount withheld may not exceed twenty-five percent of disposable earnings for that week, or the amount by which disposable earnings exceed that thirty-times figure, whichever is less. A summary that describes New York as capping garnishment near ten percent for lower incomes has the structure backwards: the ten percent is the general ceiling, and the low-earner rule is a floor below which nothing is taken at all.

One boundary the flat summaries all omit: these state protections run against ordinary private creditors. They are not a shield against child support, spousal support, federal or state taxes, or federally backed student loans, each of which is collected under its own authority. A reader whose question is a support or tax garnishment is asking a different question than this page answers, and should take it to counsel or to the collecting agency.

Homestead: The Number, Not the Adjective

Calling a homestead exemption “generous” or “modest” is not enough to run the arithmetic that decides whether a lien is worth recording, because the calculation is equity minus senior liens minus the exemption. California shows how much the adjective hides. Under Cal. Code Civ. Proc. Section 704.730(a), the homestead exemption is the greater of two figures: the countywide median sale price for a single-family home in the calendar year before the year the debtor claims it, capped at six hundred thousand dollars, or a floor of three hundred thousand dollars. The statute adjusts both figures annually for inflation.

Read that carefully and two consequences fall out. First, the protected amount is not one number statewide; it moves with the county, so the same debtor with the same equity is protected differently in a high-median coastal county than in an inland one. Second, because the floor is three hundred thousand dollars, a California residence with modest equity may be entirely out of reach while the identical equity in a state with a low fixed exemption is fully exposed. That is the difference between a lien worth recording today and a lien that is a long bet on appreciation. The dollar figures in every state are set by statute and revised, so confirm the current figure before you run the numbers, and take the collectibility conclusion to your attorney rather than treating it as settled.

Delaware is the state where “no homestead exemption” is close enough to be repeated and still wrong. Delaware gives an ordinary judgment creditor a clear path to the house: 10 Del. C. Section 4901 makes lands, tenements and hereditaments seizable and saleable on a judgment and execution once no sufficient personal estate can be found, and there is no general homestead exemption a Delaware debtor can raise against that. What Delaware does have is a principal-residence exemption that lives somewhere else. Under 10 Del. C. Section 4914(c)(1), an individual debtor domiciled in Delaware, and that debtor’s spouse, may exempt equity in real property constituting the principal residence in an aggregate amount not to exceed two hundred thousand dollars — but by the subsection’s own words that exemption operates only “in any federal bankruptcy or state insolvency proceeding,” and the same two-hundred-thousand ceiling applies to a joint case rather than doubling. The practical shape of that is unusual: the residence is exposed to a recorded judgment lien for as long as the debtor stays out of bankruptcy, and the exemption appears the moment the debtor files. Delaware also bars an individual debtor domiciled there from electing the federal exemption schedule, so the state figure is the one in play. Statutory dollar figures are revised, so confirm the current number before running equity minus senior liens minus the exemption.

An Out-of-State Judgment Runs on a Different Clock

Domesticating a judgment gives you the new state’s enforcement tools. It does not automatically give you the new state’s headline deadline, and Florida is the clearest illustration of the trap. Fla. Stat. Section 95.11 gives an action on a judgment of a Florida court of record twenty years, at subsection (1). But subsection (2)(a) gives an action on a judgment of a court not of record of Florida, or of “any court of the United States, any other state or territory in the United States, or a foreign country,” only five years. A creditor who reads that Florida judgments last twenty years and calendars accordingly, while actually holding an out-of-state judgment, is working from the wrong number by a factor of four.

South Carolina makes a different cross-border point, and it runs the other way. S.C. Code Section 15-39-420 provides that no employer in the state may withhold any portion of the wages of an employee residing in South Carolina as a result of garnishment proceedings brought in a court outside the state, unless the creditor first obtains a South Carolina judgment against that employee arising out of the same indebtedness. In other words, an out-of-state garnishment order does not travel into South Carolina on its own; the debt has to be reduced to a judgment there first. That is a domestication requirement expressed as an employer duty, and it is exactly the kind of rule that turns a confident enforcement plan into a wasted filing fee.

The practical lesson across all three of these is the same, and it is what a state-by-state view is for: the question is never only which tool you want, but which rule the debtor’s state actually applies to that tool, and what the reading of the statute is on the specific facts you have. Those readings belong to your attorney. What has to come first, in every one of these scenarios, is knowing which state the debtor and the assets are actually in — and if you are still at the stage of choosing where to bring the case rather than where to enforce it, the same border problem shows up earlier, in deciding where you can sue someone who lives in another state.

Whoever you are, the wall is identical: you cannot garnish a paycheck you cannot find, levy an account you cannot name, or lien a property you have not located. We do not provide legal advice and we do not file your enforcement papers; we supply the verified, lawful intelligence that makes those papers worth filing, then hand you back to your state’s playbook above. That intelligence comes from public records and licensed sources, opened only after a permissible purpose has been stated on the file. We are a public-records research firm. We never obtain information by pretexting or by impersonating the debtor, a bank, an employer, or a government office.

One limit sits above all of the above. Post-judgment enforcement is not a channel for finding a person who has moved for their own safety. Where a request carries indicators of domestic violence, stalking, or a protective order, we decline the work and point the requester to the court that entered the order and to victim-services resources. We also do not supply information for tenant screening, employment screening, or credit and insurance decisions: we are not a consumer reporting agency, our reports are not consumer reports under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and a landlord or employer making one of those decisions has to work through an FCRA-compliant provider instead.