California Judgment Collection Guide
California is often described as a ten-year state with unlimited renewals. For a large and precisely defined class of judgments that stopped being true. Under Code of Civil Procedure section 683.110(c), a judgment on a claim related to personal debt under $50,000 of unsatisfied principal, or a claim related to medical expenses under $200,000, may be renewed only once – and section 683.120(c) makes that single renewal run five years, not ten. If such a judgment was already renewed on or before December 31, 2022, no further application may be filed at all. This guide is about the California enforcement clock and the procedure hung on it: the ten years that run from entry, the renewal article and its two traps at both ends of the window, the writ that issues one county at a time, the earnings ceiling that changed in September 2023, and the examination order that has to be handed to the debtor in person thirty days out. What the sections below keep asking you for is not legal skill. It is an address, an employer, a county. That is our half. Everything on our side comes out of the public record and licensed sources, and only once a lawful purpose has been confirmed. This team holds no investigative licensure, practises no law and pursues no collections, and the deadlines set out here are general information rather than advice on your judgment.
The Short Version
A California money judgment is enforceable for ten years from the date of entry under CCP 683.020, and when that period ends the judgment cannot be enforced, enforcement procedures must cease, and any lien created by an enforcement procedure is extinguished. Renewal is how you get past that, and California now has two renewal regimes. The ordinary one, section 683.120(b), adds ten years from the date the application is filed and can be repeated. The restricted one, section 683.120(c), applies to the judgments listed in 683.110(c) – personal-debt claims under $50,000 and medical-expense claims under $200,000 of unsatisfied principal against a natural person – and gives one renewal, of five years, with nothing available at all if the judgment was renewed on or before December 31, 2022. There is a trap at each end of the window: the application must be filed before the period expires, and under 683.110(b) it must not be filed within five years of the last renewal, because 683.170(a) says a renewal filed too early shall be vacated. Around that clock sits the procedure – a writ of execution issued separately for each county under 699.510, an earnings withholding order capped since September 2023 by 706.050, and a debtor examination under 708.110 that must be personally served at least thirty days before the hearing. Each one needs a fact about where the debtor is, works, or owns. Supplying that, lawfully and with sources, is our part. General information, not legal advice.
Two Renewal Regimes, Not One
Which one your judgment falls into is decided by what the claim was about and how much is left.
| The question | Ordinary money judgment | Judgment listed in 683.110(c) |
|---|---|---|
| Initial period | Ten years from entry (683.020). Entry | Ten years from entry – identical. |
| How many renewals | Repeatable, no stated ceiling (683.120(b)). | Once. 683.110(c) says “only once.” |
| Length of a renewal | Ten years from the filing date. | Five years from the filing date (683.120(c)). |
| Already renewed by 31 Dec 2022 | No effect – renew again on schedule. | No application may be filed at all. |
| Post-judgment interest | Ten percent (685.010(a)(1)). | Five percent if entered, or renewed, on or after 1 Jan 2023. |
| Earliest you may refile | Five years after the previous renewal, both regimes (683.110(b)). | |
The right-hand column is the part of California law the general guides have not caught up with, and it is not a marginal category. Section 683.110(c) reaches a judgment on a claim related to medical expenses, as the enacted text of section 683.110 puts it, where the principal remaining unsatisfied against a debtor is under two hundred thousand dollars, and a judgment on a claim related to personal debt where the principal remaining unsatisfied is under fifty thousand dollars. Read together with the definitions the Legislature enacted in subdivision (d), that is most of the consumer docket: “debtor” means a natural person, and “personal debt” means money owing from a natural person out of a transaction where the money, property, insurance or services were primarily for personal, family, or household purposes.
The definitions also carve out, in the same subdivision, what does not count as due or owing – debts incurred due to or obtained by tortious or fraudulent conduct, and judgments for unpaid wages, damages, or penalties owed to an employee. A fraud judgment against an individual for forty thousand dollars is therefore not a 683.110(c) judgment even though the number is under the threshold, and neither is an unpaid-wage judgment. The classification turns on the character of the underlying claim, not on the size of the number alone, which is exactly why it is worth reading the enacted text rather than a summary of it.
The Window Has Two Edges
Most guides warn you about the late one. The early one voids the renewal outright.
The late edge is the familiar one. Section 683.130(a) permits the application for renewal of a lump-sum money judgment to be filed at any time before the expiration of the ten-year period of enforceability, or, for a judgment already renewed, before the expiration of the renewed period. There is no grace, no excusable neglect, and no mechanism to revive what has lapsed: once the period ends, 683.020 shuts enforcement down and extinguishes any lien an enforcement procedure created. The instruction that follows is unglamorous and it is the single highest-value thing on this page – calendar the entry date, not the recording date, not the date you took the file over, and not the date of the last payment.
The early edge is the one almost nobody writes about. Section 683.110(b) provides that a judgment shall not be renewed if the application is filed within five years of the previous renewal, and section 683.170(a) – amended by SB 1200 in the same package – provides that a renewal shall be vacated if the application was filed within that five-year window. Not may be. The debtor has sixty days after service of the notice of renewal under 683.160 to move to vacate, and on that ground the court has no discretion to leave the renewal standing. A creditor who files early out of caution has not been cautious; they have handed the debtor a motion that wipes the renewal out, and if the original period has run in the meantime there is nothing left to refile.
Between those two edges the enacted answer for an ordinary judgment is a five-year band: any time from the fifth anniversary of the last renewal up to the day the period expires. For a 683.110(c) judgment there is no band worth speaking of, because there is only ever one renewal to file. If you are holding a consumer or medical judgment entered in California, the practical question is no longer when to renew but whether the debtor will be reachable at all inside a window that now closes for good after fifteen years.
Watch: The California Clock
Why the date on the judgment matters more than the tool you pick.
Watch Overview
Renewing the Judgment Does Not Renew the Lien
They are separate filings, in separate offices, with separate consequences.
This is where a correctly renewed judgment still loses its security. Renewal happens at the court: under 683.120(a) the creditor files an application with the court that entered the judgment, and under 683.150(a) the clerk enters the renewal in the court records, showing the amount as renewed. Nothing in that sequence touches the county recorder, and nothing in it extends a recorded abstract.
Section 683.180(a) supplies the missing step, and it is conditional. Where a judgment lien on real property was created by a money judgment and the judgment is renewed, the duration of that lien is extended to ten years from the date the renewal application was filed if, before the existing lien expires, a certified copy of the application for renewal is recorded with the county recorder of the county where the property sits. Two deadlines, two offices, and the recording one is the easier of the two to miss because nothing at the court prompts it.
Subdivision (b) adds a trap for the debtor who has already moved the property. If an interest in real property was transferred subject to the lien and the transfer was recorded before the renewal application was filed, the lien is not extended at all unless both conditions are met: a copy of the application for renewal is personally served on the transferee, and proof of that service is filed with the court clerk within ninety days after the application was filed. That is a locate problem wearing a procedural hat – you cannot personally serve a transferee you have not identified, and the ninety days start whether or not you know who they are. Reading the current chain of title before you renew, rather than after, is what turns that subdivision from a hazard into a checklist item. The mechanics of getting a lien on the property in the first place are covered in our walkthrough of placing a judgment lien on a debtor’s property, and the state-by-state comparison of what each lien clock runs from lives in the judgment lien guide by state.
The Writ Is Issued One County at a Time
And a second writ for the same county is barred for 180 days.
Section 699.510(a) is short and it constrains the whole enforcement strategy. After entry of a money judgment the clerk issues a writ of execution on the creditor’s application, directed to the levying officer in the county where the levy is to be made and to any registered process server. The statute then says plainly that a separate writ shall be issued for each county where a levy is to be made. There is no statewide writ. A creditor who believes the debtor banks in Los Angeles County and keeps equipment in Kern County needs two.
The same subdivision adds a cost to guessing. Writs may issue successively until the judgment is satisfied, except that a new writ may not be issued for a county until 180 days after the issuance of a prior writ for that county, unless the prior writ is first returned. Point a writ at the wrong county and you have not merely wasted a fee – you have locked yourself out of that county for six months unless you get the writ back. That is the practical reason asset research belongs before the application rather than after the levy comes back empty. Which institution actually holds the account is its own research question, covered in finding a judgment debtor’s bank account.
Subdivision (c)(2) handles the debtor who is operating under another name. The writ issues in the name of the judgment debtor as listed on the judgment, but it may include additional names and the type of legal entity by which the debtor is known, as set out in an affidavit of identity that the court must approve before the clerk issues the writ. The court may approve it without a hearing or notice if the affidavit states sufficient facts. That is a genuine reach for a creditor facing an evasive debtor, and it is fenced: subdivision (e) entitles a person who is not the judgment debtor, whose property was subjected to enforcement on the strength of an affidavit of identity, to recover reasonable attorney’s fees and costs from the judgment creditor for getting their property released. An affidavit of identity is only as good as the identity research behind it, and the statute prices the error.
The Earnings Ceiling Changed in September 2023
And it can be set by a city minimum wage rather than the state one.
Section 706.050 was repealed and replaced by SB 1477 and became operative on September 1, 2023. The maximum amount of a judgment debtor’s disposable earnings for any workweek subject to levy under an earnings withholding order is the lesser of two figures: twenty percent of that week’s disposable earnings, or forty percent of the amount by which that week’s disposable earnings exceed forty-eight times the state minimum hourly wage in effect when the earnings are payable.
Then comes the sentence that makes California’s ceiling geographic. If the judgment debtor works in a location where the local minimum hourly wage is greater than the state minimum, the local wage is used for that calculation. Two debtors on identical salaries, one working in a city with its own wage ordinance and one working outside it, can be subject to materially different withholding on the same judgment. Which of the two you are dealing with depends on where the debtor actually reports for work, which is an employment fact rather than a legal one.
For pay periods other than weekly the statute supplies its own multipliers rather than leaving the arithmetic open: for a daily period the amounts are identical to the weekly figures, and the applicable hourly minimum wage is multiplied by 96 hours for a biweekly period, 104 for semimonthly, and 208 for monthly. Those four are the enacted set. The order itself is served on the employer, not on the debtor, so the entire tool is inert until somebody has named the employer – which is the research covered in finding a judgment debtor’s employer, and the broader California picture in our California wage garnishment laws explainer.
The Examination Order Carries a One-Year Lien
Serving it is not only a way to ask questions. It attaches.
Under section 708.110(a) a judgment creditor may apply for an order requiring the judgment debtor to appear before the court, or a referee, to furnish information to aid enforcement. If the creditor has not examined the debtor in the preceding 120 days, subdivision (b) says the court shall make the order on an ex parte application. If there has been an examination inside that window, subdivision (c) requires a showing of good cause.
Subdivision (d) is the part worth knowing and the part most summaries omit. The creditor must personally serve a copy of the order on the debtor not less than thirty days before the examination date – a figure raised by AB 1119 and effective from January 2024, so older checklists understate it – and service of the order creates a lien on the personal property of the judgment debtor for a period of one year from the date of the order, unless the court extends or terminates it sooner. Serving an examination order is therefore an act of security as well as discovery, which changes when it is worth doing: even if the debtor appears and reveals nothing, you have held a one-year lien on their personal property from the date of the order.
Subdivision (e) requires the order to carry a specified warning in fourteen-point boldface or capitals, telling the debtor that failing to appear may bring arrest, punishment for contempt, and an order to pay the creditor’s reasonable attorney’s fees. All of which depends on the one thing the court cannot supply: an address where the debtor can be handed the order in person, thirty days ahead. Preparing the questions is covered in our guide to post-judgment discovery; establishing where to serve is the work described below.
The Order the Dates Impose
Not a workflow we invented – the sequence the statutes force.
Date the Judgment From Entry
683.020 runs from entry. Everything downstream is measured from that one date.
Classify It Under 683.110(c)
Personal debt, medical, or neither. This decides whether you get one renewal or many.
Locate Before You Pick a County
699.510 issues per county and locks that county for 180 days.
Renew, Then Record
683.150 enters the renewal; only 683.180 extends the lien, and only if recorded in time.
Steps two and three are where files are actually lost. A judgment misclassified as an ordinary one gets diaried for a ten-year renewal that the statute will not allow, and by the time anybody checks, the five-year window under 683.120(c) has closed. A writ aimed at a county on the strength of a stale address burns the county for half a year. Neither failure is a failure of legal skill; both are failures of information, arriving at the moment a date falls due.
Two Interest Rates, Same Statute
And the trigger is the same classification as the renewal rule.
Section 685.010(a)(1) still sets ten percent per annum on the principal amount of a money judgment remaining unsatisfied. Subdivision (a)(2), added by AB 1754, drops that to five percent for judgments entered on or after January 1, 2023, or where an application for renewal is filed on or after that date, in the same two categories the renewal restriction uses: a medical-expense claim under two hundred thousand dollars of unsatisfied principal, and a personal-debt claim under fifty thousand dollars. The Legislature enumerated three examples of qualifying transactions in subparagraph (B) – an agreement governing the use of a credit card, a conditional sale contract, and a deferred deposit transaction – each cross-referenced to its own definition elsewhere in California law.
Note what that does to a renewal decision. Filing a renewal application on or after January 1, 2023 is itself one of the triggers, so a qualifying judgment entered in, say, 2016 at ten percent converts to five percent at the moment it is renewed. That is not a reason to skip a renewal, but it is a reason to know which category the judgment sits in before assuming a projected balance. Cross-state comparisons of post-judgment rates are collected in our judgment interest rates by state reference, and the timing of each enforcement stage in the post-judgment enforcement timeline.
Our Half of It, and Where It Stops
Facts with sources. The California law stays with your attorney.
Everything above is general information about how the California enforcement statutes are written. Applying them to your judgment is a different job and not ours: which regime under 683.110 your claim falls into, whether your period is still open, whether an affidavit of identity is supportable, when to file and when filing early would be fatal – those are legal judgments for you and your counsel. We do not file renewals, apply for writs, serve orders, garnish, levy, record liens, or contact the debtor to demand payment.
What we do is supply the facts the statutes assume you already hold. We confirm the judgment debtor’s identity against the judgment so a writ or an affidavit of identity is not aimed at a namesake, develop and corroborate a current address suitable for the personal service that 708.110(d) requires thirty days out, identify the employer an earnings withholding order would be served on and the location whose minimum wage may govern the 706.050 calculation, and research recorded real property, ownership interests, and business holdings across California counties so the choice of county under 699.510 is made on evidence. The sources are the public record and licensed data, and the gate on them is a lawful purpose, which holding a California judgment supplies. Nobody adopts a false identity to get past that gate, and the contents of an account are never sought. Our wider skip tracing services apply the same method outside California.
There is a request we turn down, and California names the situation for us. The Secretary of State runs the Safe at Home confidential address program for survivors of domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault, and human trafficking, precisely so that a person’s real residential address is not discoverable through the ordinary record trail. Some people have gone to real trouble to be unreachable, because being reachable is not safe. A protective order among the papers, an address of record that is evidently a stand-in, a requester whose stake in the address cannot be matched to the judgment – on any of those the request is declined and the reason is given. Holding a judgment does not change that answer. A permissible purpose authorises research into a debtor’s whereabouts for enforcement; it does not authorise handing a residential address to somebody the courts have already separated from it.
Each finding is delivered with its source and an honest confidence note, including when a trail has gone cold and when the debtor appears to have left the state, in which case we follow the records across the line and your counsel takes up the question of enforcing elsewhere – the ground covered in finding a judgment debtor who moved out of state. For a legitimate California enforcement matter a first read typically comes back within 24 hours. Where a judgment turns out to be genuinely uncollectible we say so rather than sell another search; the honest version of that assessment is in what to do about a judgment-proof debtor, and the cost of leaving a live judgment unworked in the cost of not collecting a judgment.
Who Works a California Clock
Different holders, the same dates.
California Collection Counsel
Diarying 683.130 and 683.110(b)
Creditors Past Year Five
Inside the 683.110(b) window
Businesses and Lenders
Judgments outside 683.110(c)
California Landlords
Rent and damage judgments
Self-Represented Creditors
Small-claims judgments
Out-of-State Creditors
Domesticating into California
The pressure is the same for all six. California hands you a long runway and then attaches conditions to every date on it, and the conditions are informational. A judgment brought in from elsewhere runs on California’s clock once it is here, which is the subject of our guide to domesticating a judgment; the state-by-state view of how long each judgment lives sits in how long a judgment is good for by state.
Our Commitment
A California judgment is a dated instrument. The renewal window opens five years after the last renewal and shuts the day the period expires, the writ locks a county for 180 days, the examination order has to be in the debtor’s hand thirty days out, and for a personal-debt or medical judgment there is now exactly one renewal to spend. We supply what each of those dates assumes: the debtor located and confirmed against the judgment, the employer named, the counties where recorded property actually sits identified, every finding carrying its source and an honest note on how current it is. Reading the statute onto your file stays with your attorney. Two decades of this work has run one way – out of the public record and licensed data, on a lawful purpose stated before anything is opened, with no pretexting at any stage and nothing taken from inside a bank account. That has been the arrangement since 2004.
California Clock Questions
How long is a California judgment good for?
Ten years from the date of entry, under Code of Civil Procedure section 683.020. When that period ends the judgment may not be enforced, all enforcement procedures under it must cease, and any lien created by an enforcement procedure is extinguished. The clock runs from entry, not from the day an abstract was recorded, so a creditor who recorded in year seven bought roughly three years of lien rather than ten.
Can every California judgment be renewed for another ten years?
No, and this is the change most guides have not absorbed. Section 683.110(c) lets a creditor renew only once a judgment on a claim related to medical expenses under $200,000 of unsatisfied principal, or a claim related to personal debt under $50,000, against a natural person. Section 683.120(c) makes that single renewal run five years rather than ten, and bars any application at all if the judgment was renewed on or before December 31, 2022. Ordinary money judgments outside that list still renew for ten years and can be renewed again.
What counts as personal debt for the once-only renewal rule?
Section 683.110(d) defines it as money owing from a natural person arising out of a transaction in which the money, property, insurance, or services were primarily for the debtor’s personal, family, or household purposes. The same subdivision excludes debts incurred due to or obtained by tortious or fraudulent conduct, and judgments for unpaid wages, damages, or penalties owed to an employee. A small fraud judgment against an individual is therefore outside the restriction even though the amount is under the threshold.
Can I renew a California judgment early to be safe?
No. Section 683.110(b) bars a renewal application filed within five years of the previous renewal, and section 683.170(a) provides that the renewal shall be vacated if it was filed inside that window. The debtor has sixty days after service of the notice of renewal to bring the motion. Filing early is not caution; it can destroy the renewal and leave nothing to refile if the original period has since run.
Does renewing the judgment automatically extend my recorded lien?
It does not. Renewal is filed with the court under 683.120 and entered by the clerk under 683.150. Extending the lien is a separate act under 683.180(a): a certified copy of the renewal application must be recorded with the county recorder where the property sits, before the existing lien expires, which then extends the lien to ten years from the filing of the application. If the property was transferred subject to the lien and that transfer was recorded first, subdivision (b) requires personal service on the transferee plus proof of service filed within ninety days.
Why do I need a separate writ of execution for each county?
Because section 699.510(a) says so – the writ is directed to the levying officer in the county where the levy is to be made, and a separate writ shall be issued for each county. The same subdivision blocks a new writ for a county until 180 days after a prior writ issued for it, unless the prior writ is returned first. Aiming a writ at the wrong county therefore costs six months of access to that county, which is why identifying where the assets genuinely are belongs before the application.
How much of a paycheck can be withheld in California now?
Under section 706.050, operative since September 1, 2023, the maximum is the lesser of twenty percent of that week’s disposable earnings or forty percent of the amount by which those earnings exceed forty-eight times the state minimum hourly wage. If the debtor works where a local minimum wage is higher than the state one, the local wage is used for that calculation. For non-weekly periods the statute multiplies the applicable minimum wage by 96 hours biweekly, 104 semimonthly, and 208 monthly.
How does this page differ from your California judgment collection page?
This guide owns the clock and the procedure – the ten-year period, the two renewal regimes, the writ, the earnings withholding order, the debtor examination, and post-judgment interest. The California judgment collection page owns the asset side: what a lien actually reaches, the separate personal-property lien filed with the Secretary of State, the homestead, and how community-property liability under the Family Code decides whether a judgment against one spouse touches anything. The two do not overlap, and neither repeats the other.
Your California Clock Is Running
Every step on this page has a date attached to it, and the statute assumes you can already reach the debtor when the date arrives. The names, the dates you are working to, and the purpose the law lets you rely on are enough to start. What comes back is a corroborated current location and the recorded California assets, written up for your attorney, ordinarily with a first read within 24 hours. Contact us to get started.
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