Wage Garnishment Laws by State

Before any state rule matters, there is a national rule that none of them can undercut. Title III of the Consumer Credit Protection Act, codified at 15 U.S.C. § 1673, restricts ordinary garnishment to the lesser of two figures: 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. At the current federal minimum, that second figure protects roughly the first $217 and fifty cents of weekly take-home pay outright. “Disposable earnings” is what remains after legally required deductions, taxes, Social Security, Medicare, and the like, not gross pay and not the figure after voluntary deductions.

The word that does the work is lesser. A creditor never gets both calculations; they get whichever yields the smaller bite. For a low-wage worker the thirty-times floor can shrink the garnishable amount to nothing even though the percentage cap would otherwise allow more. That federal calculation is the floor under all fifty states. Each state legislature is free to protect the debtor further, and many do, but no state may let a creditor reach more than the CCPA permits.

It is not really a “lesser of” rule. It is a three-band test with a $290 threshold

Almost every page on this subject stops at the statute. The Secretary of Labor was told, by the closing sentence of 1673(a) itself, to write the operating rule, and the regulation he wrote states the same test in a form the statute does not: three bands with a hard threshold at forty times the minimum wage. From 29 C.F.R. § 870.10(b), paragraph by paragraph: if disposable earnings for the workweek are equal to or less than thirty times the minimum wage, “the individual’s earnings may not be garnished in any amount”; if they are more than thirty times but less than forty times, “only the amount above” the thirty-times figure is subject to garnishment; and if they are forty times or more, “25 percent of his/her disposable earnings is subject to garnishment.”

At the current federal minimum wage the band edges are $217.50 and $290.00. Below $217.50 a week, nothing. Between the two, the excess only. At $290.00 and above, a flat quarter. That $290 edge is the number missing from the ordinary telling, and it is the point at which the answer stops depending on the floor and starts depending on the percentage — which is exactly where a state that has moved the floor and a state that has moved the rate begin to diverge on the same paycheck.

Three further things are worth fixing in mind before the map makes sense. First, the federal cap governs ordinary debts, the credit cards, medical bills, and money judgments that make up most collections. Second, a different and higher set of limits applies to support, taxes, and federal student loans, covered further down. Third, the cap that controls a given garnishment is the rule of the place the debtor earns the wages, which is exactly why locating the debtor’s actual employer is not a side task, it is the first step.

Every one of the five levers above moves the same dial. That is useful, and it is also the reason a table of percentages so often predicts the wrong outcome. Read 15 U.S.C. § 1673(a) for what it actually does and it prescribes a maximum part of disposable earnings and nothing else. It does not say who issues the order, when withholding begins, how long the order lives, what happens when a second one arrives, or whether it follows the debtor to a new job. The federal interest genuinely stops at the arithmetic: 29 C.F.R. § 870.51(a) says in terms that “differences in text between the restrictions of State laws and those in section 303(a) of the Act are not material so long as the State laws provide the same or greater restrictions.” Same or greater protection, and the rest is the state’s business.

So two states can publish an identical twenty-five percent cap and produce completely different results on the same paycheck. These five properties are what decide it.

1. Who issues it

In some states the clerk of court issues the writ on application; in others it goes through a sheriff or levying officer; in at least one, a registered process server can issue it. That sets how fast an order reaches a payroll department, who is answerable if it is defective, and what proof of service the employer will accept before withholding starts.

2. When it starts biting

The federal rule on timing is unusually clear and almost never quoted. Under 29 C.F.R. § 870.10(d), “the date that disposable earnings are paid or payable, and not the date the Court issues the garnishment order, is controlling in determining the amount of disposable earnings that may be garnished.” An order written under one minimum wage is recalculated automatically against the rate in force when the wages become payable. State law adds the part that varies: a grace period before the first withholding, a mandatory notice, a claim-of-exemption window that suspends withholding while it runs.

3. How long it lives

The property most often assumed away. Some states issue a continuing order that runs until the judgment is satisfied; others expire the writ on a fixed clock of ninety days, one hundred eighty days or a year, and a creditor who does not diary the re-issue simply stops being paid, with no notice and no default. The distinctive-feature column in the table below flags this jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

4. Where you sit in the queue

The caps are ceilings on the total withheld, not an allowance per creditor, so a second order is frequently worth nothing while the first runs. States split between first-served priority and pro-rata sharing, and a third variation fixes priority by the moment the writ is delivered to the enforcement officer rather than issued or served. What that means in practice is set out below.

5. Whether it survives a job change

Portability is where garnishments quietly die. In several states the order attaches to the employer rather than to the debtor, so a job change ends it and a fresh writ is needed. At least one puts a fixed window on it: if the debtor returns to the same employer inside the period the levy revives, and after it the order is dead. Elsewhere a later order served while an earlier one is running is not merely subordinate but legally ineffective, so a creditor who serves out of turn has spent a writ on nothing.

Four of those five are decided by the identity of the employer named in the order, and the fifth by when that employer was served. Which is why the practical sequence is not “look up the cap, then find the debtor” but the reverse.

The bottom row is the one that quietly sinks out-of-state creditors. A judgment that would have been routinely collectible through payroll in a baseline state is, against a debtor who has since moved to a jurisdiction that bars the remedy, simply not collectible from wages at all. The judgment is still good, but the strategy has to change the moment you learn where the debtor now works, which is, again, why the locate comes first. Note that the third column, not the second, is where most of the surprises live.

These are the same three bands worked as ordinary sums. The statutory form is the lesser of two numbers and creditors routinely quote only the first; both have to be calculated, every pay period, against disposable earnings — gross pay minus legally required deductions such as tax and Social Security. Voluntary deductions like a 401(k) contribution, union dues or health premiums do not come out first; they are not “required by law”, so they stay inside the garnishable base. That single distinction changes the answer more often than the percentage does.

Example 1 — the ordinary case

Disposable earnings of $800 in a state with no stricter rule. Limb one: 25% of $800 = $200. Limb two: the excess over thirty times the federal minimum hourly wage. At the current federal minimum of $7.25, that floor is $217.50, so the excess is $800 − $217.50 = $582.50. The lesser figure governs, so the garnishment takes $200. Here limb one binds, which is the case creditors picture. In the regulation’s own terms this worker is in the third band — disposable earnings at or above forty times the minimum wage, so a flat twenty-five percent applies and the floor is irrelevant.

Example 2 — the low-wage case, where the answer is often zero

Disposable earnings of $240. Limb one: 25% = $60. Limb two: $240 − $217.50 = $22.50. The lesser governs, so the correct withholding is $22.50 — not $60. Drop the same worker to $210 disposable and limb two is negative, so the garnishment takes nothing at all, no matter how large the judgment. A debtor earning at or near minimum wage is effectively judgment-proof on wages, and no amount of locate work changes that arithmetic. This is the single most useful thing to establish before spending money on enforcement. Both figures sit inside the regulation’s middle band — above $217.50 but below $290.00 — where the percentage never binds and only the excess over the floor is reachable.

Example 3 — where a state floor displaces the federal one

Several states keep the 25% cap but raise the protected floor, usually by tying it to a state minimum wage well above $7.25. Take a state whose floor is forty times a $16 state minimum: the protected amount becomes $640 a week rather than $217.50. Our worker on $800 disposable now yields limb one of $200 and limb two of $160 — so the garnishment takes $160, and the same worker on $650 yields almost nothing. The percentage never changed; the floor did all the work. This is why “what is the cap in my state” is the wrong question and “what is the protected floor” is the right one.

None of this is a substitute for the actual state statute or for counsel — the figures above use the federal minimum for illustration, state minimums change, and several states run tiered rates that no single worked example captures. Use your jurisdiction’s page for the governing text.

Exactly one state has ever been exempted from the federal formula

The opening words of 1673(a) are “Except as provided in subsection (b) and in section 1675“, and section 1675 is the part nobody reads. Under 15 U.S.C. § 1675 the Secretary of Labor “may by regulation exempt from the provisions of section 1673(a) and (b)(2) of this title garnishments issued under the laws of any State if he determines that the laws of that State provide restrictions on garnishment which are substantially similar” to the federal ones. In other words, a state whose own protections do the same job can be released from the federal test entirely, and its own statute becomes the whole of the rule.

The list of states that have obtained that release is at 29 C.F.R. § 870.57. It is written in the plural — “the laws of the following States” — and it has one entry: “(a) State of Virginia”, effective 30 June 1978. There is no paragraph (b). Fifty-eight years of the CCPA, fifty-two jurisdictions, one formal exemption. The regulation also names the governing provision by number, providing that where a Virginia garnishment is “not deemed to be governed by section 34-29 of the Code of Virginia” and another state’s law is applied, the federal restrictions apply after all.

Two consequences. For every other jurisdiction the federal bands are not a historical baseline that state law has replaced — they are live law running underneath the state cap, and the more protective of the two governs each paycheck. And the reason there is only one exemption is visible in 29 C.F.R. § 870.51(a): similarity is judged on whether the state laws “provide the same or greater protection”, considered together. It is a test about the formula, not about the procedure — which is precisely why states have been left free to diverge so wildly on everything else.

An employer may not fire the debtor over one garnishment — and only one

The question every payroll department and every debtor asks, and the one almost no comparison page answers, has a one-sentence federal answer. 15 U.S.C. § 1674(a): “No employer may discharge any employee by reason of the fact that his earnings have been subjected to garnishment for any one indebtedness.” Subsection (b) makes a willful violation punishable by a fine “not more than $1,000, or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

The load-bearing words are “any one indebtedness”. The federal protection covers the first debt and stops there; a second creditor’s order on the same employee is outside 1674 altogether, and whether the employee is protected then is a question of state law, which several states answer more generously than Congress did. For a creditor that matters commercially, not just legally: a garnishment that costs the debtor the job produces nothing for anyone.