New York Judgment Collection Guide
Winning a money judgment in New York is only the first half of the fight. The court hands you a piece of paper; it does not hand you the money. Everything that turns that paper into a recovered debt happens under CPLR Article 52 – income executions, restraining notices, bank levies, sheriff seizures, and post-judgment discovery – and every one of those tools depends on knowing where your debtor banks, works, and holds property. This guide walks the full New York enforcement toolkit, statute by statute, and shows how locating the debtor’s assets is what makes each remedy actually collect.
The Short Version
A New York money judgment is enforceable for twenty years from entry under CPLR 211(b), and it accrues statutory interest at nine percent a year under CPLR 5004 the whole time – so an unenforced judgment is not worthless, it is just waiting. CPLR Article 52 gives a judgment creditor a deep toolkit: an income execution that captures up to ten percent of the debtor’s gross wages (CPLR 5231), a restraining notice that freezes the debtor’s bank account and other property (CPLR 5222), a property execution that sends a sheriff or marshal to levy and sell assets (CPLR 5232), and information subpoenas and depositions to find out what the debtor has (CPLR 5223 and 5224). Docketing the judgment puts a lien on any real property the debtor owns in that county for ten years (CPLR 5203). But notice the common thread: every tool needs a target – an employer, a bank, a parcel, an asset. We are a public-records research firm that finds those targets, and for a legitimate enforcement matter a verified locate typically comes back within 24 hours.
Watch: Collecting a NY Judgment
Why enforcement, not the verdict, is where money is won or lost.
Watch Overview
The New York Enforcement Clock
How long you have, and why the debt keeps growing while you wait.
The single most important fact a New York judgment creditor can know is that the clock is long and the debt does not stand still. Under CPLR 211(b), a money judgment is presumed paid only after twenty years, which in practice means you have twenty years from entry to enforce it. That is a generation. A debtor who is broke, unemployed, or judgment-proof today may inherit, sell a house, land a salaried job, or open a business years from now – and a properly preserved judgment is still waiting when they do.
While you wait, the judgment earns interest. Under CPLR 5004, the statutory post-judgment interest rate is nine percent per year, simple interest, on the unpaid balance. On a judgment of any size that is a meaningful number compounding into your favor every year it goes uncollected, and it is one reason patient, well-documented enforcement so often beats a panicked fire sale. The interest is part of what you collect; it is not a courtesy you have to fight for.
There is one timeline that is shorter and that catches creditors off guard. A judgment is enforceable for twenty years, but as a lien against real property it lasts only ten years from docketing under CPLR 5203, unless you act to preserve it. New York gives you two ways to keep that lien alive past year ten: a creditor can commence an action on the judgment to obtain a renewal judgment under CPLR 5014, or move the court under CPLR 5203 to extend the lien in defined circumstances. The practical rule practitioners follow is to start the renewal roughly a year before the ten-year lien expires, so the renewed lien is docketed before the original one lapses. Miss it, and the debt is still collectible – but your priority position against that house may be gone.
The CPLR Article 52 Toolkit
Five enforcement tools, the statute behind each, and the target it needs.
| Enforcement Tool | Statute | What It Does | What It Needs to Work |
|---|---|---|---|
| Income Execution | CPLR 5231 | Diverts up to ten percent of the debtor’s gross wages through a sheriff or marshal serving the employer. | The debtor’s current employer and payroll address. |
| Restraining Notice | CPLR 5222 | Freezes the debtor’s bank account and other property, up to twice the judgment, with no prior court order. | The bank and branch where the debtor holds funds. |
| Property Execution | CPLR 5232 | Sends a sheriff or marshal to levy and sell the debtor’s non-exempt personal or real property. | The specific asset, its location, and who holds it. |
| Real-Property Lien | CPLR 5203 | Attaches a lien to any real estate the debtor owns in the docketing county for ten years. | The county where the debtor owns property, for docketing. |
| Information Subpoena Find First | CPLR 5223-5224 | Compels the debtor or third parties to disclose where assets, income, and accounts are. | The right party to subpoena – which a locate identifies. |
Read down the right-hand column and the pattern is unmistakable. None of these remedies fires on the judgment alone. The income execution needs an employer. The restraining notice needs a bank. The property execution needs an asset and its location. The lien needs the county where the debtor owns real estate. Even the discovery tools need you to know the right party to serve. New York hands you a powerful, well-defined set of weapons – and then leaves it entirely to you to find the targets. That gap, between having the right to collect and knowing where to point it, is the whole game.
Income Execution: Reaching the Paycheck
CPLR 5231 – the workhorse of New York judgment collection.
For a debtor with a regular job, the income execution under CPLR 5231 is usually the most reliable remedy in the box. It directs a sheriff or city marshal to serve the execution first on the debtor and, if the debtor does not begin paying voluntarily within twenty days, on the debtor’s employer, who must then withhold and remit the installments. The amount is capped at ten percent of the debtor’s gross income from the employer. There is also a floor that protects low earners: no deduction is taken if the debtor’s weekly disposable earnings fall below thirty times the federal minimum hourly wage, and the levy may not push earnings below that line. Federal wage-garnishment limits run alongside the state cap, and the lower applicable limit controls.
The income execution’s strength is also its dependency: it is useless without the employer. You cannot serve an execution on a paycheck you cannot find, and debtors who know a judgment exists often change jobs, work off the books, or are paid through an entity that obscures the real payer. This is why so much New York wage collection turns into a hunt for current employment. Pinning down where the debtor actually works – and the correct payroll address to serve – is frequently the difference between an execution that quietly collects every pay period and one that sits in a drawer. Our work locating a debtor’s employer for wage garnishment exists precisely to feed this tool. For the deeper New York wage rules – priority between competing executions, what counts as gross income, and how support orders interact – see our companion guide to New York wage garnishment laws, which goes narrow where this page goes broad.
Restraining Notices and Bank Levies
CPLR 5222 and the Exempt Income Protection Act.
The restraining notice is New York’s fastest hard-hitting tool. Under CPLR 5222, the judgment creditor’s attorney – acting as an officer of the court – or the court clerk can issue a restraining notice without first going back to a judge. Served on a bank, it freezes the debtor’s account; served on the debtor, it forbids them from transferring or disposing of property. A garnishee bank that is restrained must hold up to twice the amount due on the judgment, and once it holds that much, the notice is not effective against the debtor’s other property. The freeze generally lasts one year, and a creditor may not serve more than two restraining notices per year on a natural person’s bank account.
New York wraps the bank restraint in strong debtor protections through the Exempt Income Protection Act, codified at CPLR 5222-a. A bank served with a restraint must give the debtor exemption notices and claim forms, and certain funds are shielded automatically. The statute protects a baseline amount tied to the minimum wage – an amount equal to or less than the greater of two hundred forty times the federal minimum hourly wage or two hundred forty times the New York state minimum wage may not be restrained at all. Directly deposited exempt funds, such as Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and certain pensions, are protected, and recent wages enjoy their own shield. If the creditor fails to serve the required notices and forms with the restraint, the restraint is void and the bank must not freeze the account. EIPA does not stop legitimate collection from a debtor with non-exempt funds; it stops the old practice of freezing a low-income debtor’s protected money.
The restraining notice, like every other tool, is only as good as your knowledge of where the money sits. You cannot freeze an account at a bank you have not identified. Many creditors send a restraint to the one bank they happen to know about, miss the account where the debtor actually keeps funds, and conclude wrongly that the debtor has nothing. Identifying the debtor’s banking relationships before you serve is how a restraint lands on a funded account instead of an empty one – the focus of our guide to finding a judgment debtor’s bank account.
Property Execution and Asset Discovery
CPLR 5232 levies, and CPLR 5223-5224 to find what to levy.
When the debtor’s value is in property rather than wages or cash, the property execution under CPLR 5232 is the instrument. The creditor delivers an execution to a sheriff or city marshal, who then levies on the debtor’s non-exempt personal property or real property – by seizing personal property, or by serving the levy and proceeding toward a sale of real estate. The enforcement officer can reach tangible goods, business assets, and other property in which the debtor holds an interest, subject to New York’s exemptions. The mechanics matter, but the prerequisite matters more: a sheriff levies on a specific thing in a specific place. The execution has to name the asset and where it is. A levy in the abstract collects nothing.
That is why post-judgment discovery is the engine room of New York enforcement, and why experienced creditors reach for it early. CPLR 5223 lets a judgment creditor compel disclosure of all matter relevant to satisfying the judgment, and CPLR 5224 supplies the instruments: the information subpoena – a set of written questions a creditor can serve without a court order, including on third parties like banks and employers – and the subpoena for a deposition or for documents, putting the debtor under oath about income, accounts, transfers, and property. Used well, discovery converts a creditor’s blindness into a map: it identifies the employer to serve under CPLR 5231, the bank to restrain under CPLR 5222, and the assets to levy under CPLR 5232.
Discovery has its own catch, though, and it is the same one. An information subpoena only works if you serve it on a party who actually holds information – the right bank, the right employer, the right relative or business associate. A debtor who stonewalls a subpoena, or who has structured assets to stay invisible, can blunt the tool. This is where independent public-records research and post-judgment discovery reinforce each other: a locate tells you whom to subpoena and gives you leads to test against the debtor’s sworn answers, so evasive or incomplete responses stand out instead of ending the inquiry.
Exemptions and Why Collection Stalls
What New York shields, and where creditors actually lose ground.
New York protects a defined slice of a debtor’s property from enforcement, and a realistic collection plan accounts for it. The homestead exemption shields a band of equity in a primary residence that varies by county, motor-vehicle and tools-of-trade equity are protected up to set amounts, and a long list of income – Social Security, public assistance, unemployment, veterans’ and disability benefits, and most retirement accounts – is exempt. Wages are protected in large part, with the income execution reaching only that ten percent slice. The exact dollar figures are adjusted over time, so the current statutory amounts should always be confirmed against the live statute rather than an old chart. For a focused walk-through of what New York shelters from creditors and how to plan around it, see our companion page on New York asset exemptions for creditors.
Exemptions are real, but they are also frequently overestimated as a reason to give up. A debtor is rarely exempt across the board; most have some non-exempt equity, some non-protected income, or some asset they assume no one will find. The more common reason New York collection stalls is not that the debtor is judgment-proof – it is that the creditor never located the non-exempt asset in the first place. Below are the situations where a winning judgment quietly goes uncollected.
Unknown Employer
The debtor changed jobs after judgment, so the income execution has no payroll to land on.
Wrong Bank Restrained
A restraint hits an account the debtor barely uses while the funded account sits at a bank you never checked.
Property in Another County
The debtor owns real estate, but in a county where you never docketed, so no lien attaches.
Assets Behind Entities
Value is parked in an LLC, a business, or a relative’s name, hidden from a surface search.
Debtor Moved Counties
The debtor relocated and the address on the judgment no longer reaches them for service of an execution.
Lien Allowed to Lapse
The ten-year real-property lien expired unrenewed, so a once-secured creditor falls behind newer ones.
Docketing a Judgment in Multiple Counties
How a transcript of judgment extends your reach across New York.
A New York judgment lien on real property is a county-by-county affair. Docketing the judgment with the county clerk creates a lien on the debtor’s real estate in that county under CPLR 5203 – but only in that county. If the debtor owns a house in one county and a rental in another, a single docketing reaches only the first. To extend the lien, the creditor obtains a transcript of judgment from the county where it is entered and dockets that transcript with the clerk of each additional county where the debtor owns, or might come to own, real property. The lien attaches as of the date of docketing in each county and runs ten years from that date.
This is a quietly important and underused step. Because docketing is cheap relative to what it secures, a creditor who suspects the debtor has – or will acquire – real estate elsewhere in New York can docket broadly and capture equity that a single-county filing would miss entirely. It also positions the judgment to catch future purchases: a lien properly docketed in a county can attach to property the debtor buys there later, ahead of the debtor’s plans. The limiting factor, again, is knowledge. You docket where you believe the debtor holds property, which means the value of multi-county docketing rises and falls with how well you have mapped the debtor’s real-estate footprint across the state.
From Judgment to Recovery
How locating the debtor’s assets turns each NY tool into collected money.
Confirm the Judgment
Verify entry and the twenty-year clock, calculate accrued nine-percent interest, and docket promptly so the real-property lien starts running.
Locate the Targets
We rebuild the debtor’s current employer, banking relationships, real property, and business interests from public records and licensed databases.
Point the Right Tool
Match each asset to its remedy – employer to income execution, bank to restraining notice, property to a sheriff’s levy and county docketing.
Enforce and Document
Your attorney or enforcement officer serves the executions and subpoenas; our research supports discovery and flags evasive answers.
Where the Locate Earns Its Keep
We do not enforce judgments; we make the enforcement tools collectible.
It is worth being precise about the line we work on. We are not your attorney, we do not issue executions or restraining notices, and we are not a credit reporting agency – our research is for lawful judgment-enforcement purposes, not for tenant screening, employment decisions, or other uses governed by consumer-reporting law. What we do is the part the statutes assume you have already done: find the employer, the bank, the property, and the assets that make CPLR Article 52 actionable. As a public-records research firm working investigative-grade and licensed data sources, we deliver the debtor’s current employment, banking relationships, real-estate holdings, business affiliations, and known associates – the precise inputs the income execution, restraining notice, property execution, and lien each require.
That research also strengthens the discovery process. When you depose a debtor or serve an information subpoena under CPLR 5223 and 5224, having an independent picture of the debtor’s assets lets you test the sworn answers – so an omitted account or an undisclosed employer becomes a contradiction you can pursue, not a dead end. New York’s enforcement framework is one of the most creditor-capable in the country; the limiting reagent is almost always information. For collection in other states, our overview of judgment collection by state shows how the same find-the-asset logic plays out under each state’s rules. New York debtors who have moved, gone quiet, or restructured their holdings are exactly the kind of locate we handle, and for a legitimate enforcement matter a verified result typically comes back within 24 hours.
Who We Help
We supply the asset intelligence; you enforce the judgment.
Collections Attorneys
Assets located for executions
Judgment Creditors
Employer and bank found
Small Businesses
Unpaid invoices enforced
Landlords
Rent and damage judgments
Contractors
Mechanic’s-lien collection
Small-Claims Winners
Self-represented and stuck
Whoever you are, the wall is identical: a New York money judgment is a right to collect, not the collection itself, and CPLR Article 52 only works when you can name the employer, the bank, the parcel, or the asset. We find those targets through lawful public-records research and skip tracing, deliver them in a form your attorney or enforcement officer can act on, and stand ready to support post-judgment discovery when a debtor is hiding what they have.
Our Commitment
We find what makes a New York judgment collectible – the current employer for an income execution, the bank for a restraining notice, and the real property and assets for a sheriff’s levy or county lien. Lawful, enforcement-ready asset research for creditors, attorneys, and businesses since 2004.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long is a money judgment enforceable in New York?
A New York money judgment is enforceable for twenty years from entry under CPLR 211(b), and it accrues statutory interest at nine percent a year under CPLR 5004 the entire time. As a lien against real property, however, it lasts ten years from docketing under CPLR 5203 unless renewed or extended, so the lien deadline arrives long before the enforcement deadline.
How much of a debtor’s wages can a NY income execution take?
An income execution under CPLR 5231 captures up to ten percent of the debtor’s gross income from the employer. No deduction is taken if the debtor’s weekly disposable earnings fall below thirty times the federal minimum wage, and federal garnishment limits apply alongside the state cap, with the lower applicable limit controlling.
Can a creditor freeze a NY bank account without a court order?
Yes. Under CPLR 5222, the judgment creditor’s attorney or the court clerk can issue a restraining notice without a fresh court order, and serving it on the debtor’s bank freezes the account up to twice the amount due on the judgment for up to one year. A creditor may not serve more than two such notices per year on a natural person’s bank account.
What is the Exempt Income Protection Act?
The Exempt Income Protection Act, codified at CPLR 5222-a, limits how a bank may restrain an individual’s account. It requires exemption notices and claim forms, shields a minimum-wage-based baseline from restraint, and protects directly deposited exempt funds such as Social Security and pensions. If the required notices and forms are not served with the restraint, the restraint is void.
How does a creditor find out what assets a NY debtor has?
Through post-judgment discovery under CPLR 5223 and 5224. An information subpoena lets a creditor serve written questions, even on third parties like banks and employers, without a court order, and a deposition subpoena puts the debtor under oath about income and property. Independent public-records research identifies whom to subpoena and provides leads to test the answers.
How does a property execution work in New York?
Under CPLR 5232, the creditor delivers an execution to a sheriff or city marshal, who levies on the debtor’s non-exempt personal or real property – seizing goods or proceeding toward a sale of real estate. The execution must identify the specific asset and its location, so the levy depends on first locating what the debtor owns.
Can I enforce a judgment against property in another NY county?
Yes. A docketed judgment creates a real-property lien only in that county under CPLR 5203. To reach property elsewhere, obtain a transcript of judgment and docket it with the clerk of each additional county where the debtor owns real estate; the lien attaches as of docketing and runs ten years from that date in each county.
How fast can you locate a New York debtor’s assets, and what do you need?
For a legitimate enforcement matter, a verified locate typically comes back within 24 hours. Send the debtor’s name, last known address, date of birth, and your judgment details, plus any employer, bank, or business leads, and we rebuild the current employer, banking relationships, real property, and assets from there.
Holding a NY Judgment You Can’t Collect?
We find what makes CPLR Article 52 work – the employer for an income execution, the bank for a restraining notice, and the property and assets for a sheriff’s levy – typically within 24 hours. Contact us to get started.
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