California Asset Exemptions: Three Calendars and One Frozen Amount

Section 703.150(e) requires the Judicial Council to publish the current amounts, and form EJ-156, Current Dollar Amounts of Exemptions From Enforcement of Judgments is that list, an optional form. The mandatory-use form is EJ-155, adopted under sections 681.030(c) and 700.010, which indexes categories against code sections, carries no amounts, and warns on its face that it may not list every exemption.

Read the form’s column, not the code’s. On most of these sections the printed statutory figure differs from the operative one, because the Judicial Council adjusts the amounts without the code being amended and the statute carries no adjustment note: section 704.010 prints $7,500 against the form’s $8,625, section 704.040 $8,725 against $10,950. Quote the form for the amount, the section for the rule.

The effective dates are not all the same. EJ-156 puts the section 704.220(a) amount at July 1, 2026, adjusted each July 1 by the Department of Social Services, then says that unless otherwise provided by statute, “the other amounts are all effective April 1, 2025”. Section 704.220 sits inside article 3, but the code carries no figure for it at all – the amount is a welfare standard the Judicial Council publishes as $2,325.

The section 704.113 row is narrower than its label reads. Section 704.113(a) defines its “vacation credits” as credits accumulated by a state employee under Government Code section 19858.1, or by any other public employee under a law for the accumulation of vacation credits applicable to that employee – a public-employment term of art, not a general description of accrued leave. And section 704.113(c) provides that amounts paid out representing vacation credits are subject to an earnings withholding order or an earnings assignment order for support, and are exempt to the same extent as the earnings of a judgment debtor. Once the credits are paid out, the $8,625 is no longer the measure; the earnings rule is.

The California homestead is a formula, not a number: section 704.730(a) makes it the greater of the countywide median sale price for a single-family home in the calendar year before the year the debtor claims the exemption, not to exceed $600,000, or $300,000, and subdivision (b) adjusts “the amounts specified in this section” annually from January 1, 2022, rounded to the nearest twenty-five dollars. The printed $600,000 and $300,000 are therefore the 2021 baselines, and this page neither computes nor publishes a current figure: section 703.150(e)’s publication duty does not reach article 4, and “704.730” appears nowhere in EJ-156, so the Judicial Council’s list does not carry the homestead amount and the statute does not require it to. The cross-jurisdiction picture sits on our homestead exemptions in judgment enforcement hub.

Because subdivision (b) rounds each adjusted amount and the only amounts the section specifies are the cap and the floor, a figure offered as California’s homestead cap or floor that is not a multiple of $25 cannot be the statutory amount. The limit matters as much: where the operative homestead is the countywide median itself, that median is a market input the statute imports, not an amount the section specifies, so it is not rounded. Proceeds are limited by the exemption itself, not merely by the calendar: section 704.720(b) exempts the proceeds of a homestead sale, of insurance for its damage or destruction, or of an acquisition for public use only “in the amount of the homestead exemption provided in Section 704.730”, and only for six months after the debtor actually receives them – and not even that long if a homestead exemption is applied to other property inside that period. Section 704.720(c) allows only one exempt homestead where spouses reside separately. This page addresses the automatic homestead in article 4; the declared-homestead procedure is separate.

Section 703.030(a) is blunt about silence: an exemption may be claimed in the time and manner the applicable enforcement procedure prescribes, and “if the exemption is not so claimed, the exemption is waived and the property is subject to enforcement of a money judgment”. Subdivision (b) takes automatic exemptions out of that machinery altogether, and the phrase “exempt without making a claim” appears in nineteen of article 3’s thirty sections. Subdivision (c) preserves relief under section 473 for a claim missed in time. Section 703.010 opens with “Except as otherwise provided by statute”, so the rules it states are not absolutes – they yield to a contrary statute.

The clocks are short on both sides. Under section 703.520(a) a claimant – not necessarily the judgment debtor – has 15 days after service of the notice of levy if personally served and 20 if served by mail, and a claim mailed with a carrier tracking number is complete on the date it is postmarked rather than the date it arrives. Section 703.520(c) qualifies those clocks: where the judgment is for a personal debt as defined in section 683.110(d), a claimant may file more than 20 days after service, though the levying officer may release the funds to the creditor once the 20 days expire. The creditor then has 15 days under section 703.550 to file a notice of opposition and a notice of motion with the court and copies with the levying officer, and if it does not, “the levying officer shall immediately release the property to the extent it is claimed to be exempt”. Under section 703.570 the hearing follows within 30 days of that motion unless continued for good cause, on 10 days’ notice, and unless the court orders otherwise, property not determined in time is released under section 703.580(f). For a personal debt, section 703.580(d) also requires the return of property exempt without a claim that was levied on within the preceding 12 months, or that the debtor shows would have been exempt by claim and was levied on within six months – and neither period is a cap, since each paragraph preserves the judge’s power to order a return for good cause beyond it.

Every figure above is applied to a known asset, and somebody has to establish what the debtor owns first. For a valid California judgment and a lawful, permissible purpose, we locate the debtor and document real property and recorded liens, vehicles and titled assets, business and ownership filings, and holdings held through entities, trusts or other people, each with its source. A first read typically comes back within 24 hours. That is the discipline behind finding hidden assets, a focused asset search for judgment collection, the framing of exempt versus nonexempt assets, and our skip tracing services page.

People Locator Skip Tracing is a public-records research firm working under permissible-purpose rules, including those of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act. We are not a law firm and this page is not legal advice: whether an asset is exempt, and to what extent, is for your attorney under current California law and for a court if it is contested. We are not a collection agency – we do not contact the debtor, demand payment or collect. We never access private financial account contents or balances. We describe what we search, not what we will find. And we step back where safety is in play: where a subject appears to be hiding from abuse, or is protected by a restraining order, we decline to locate them, and we point the person asking toward the court and the local advocates who can help.