Connecticut Judgment Collection
Connecticut does not hand a creditor a menu of remedies. It sets four deadlines that all run from the date of entry, records liens town by town rather than county by county, and gates the wage execution behind a court-ordered payment plan the debtor has to break first. This page walks that sequence and shows where the factual gaps stop it.
The Short Version
A Connecticut money judgment can be executed on for 20 years from entry and sued on for 25 – 10 and 15 for small claims – and a motion to revive has to be filed before the wall, not after. The lien on land is created by recording a judgment lien certificate in the town clerk’s office, and a certificate recorded within four months of judgment can reach back to an earlier attachment if it carries the recital the statute prints. The remedy most guides list first is the one Connecticut makes hardest to reach: a wage execution is available only after the debtor defaults on an installment payment order, which the creditor can obtain ex parte under 52-356d(c). Every one of those steps needs a fact – an employer, a bank, a parcel, a date of entry – and that is the part we do.
Watch: Connecticut Judgment Collection: Enforce a CT Judgment
Two minutes on what makes a Connecticut file move, before the statutory detail below.
Watch Overview
Four Deadlines in One Statute
Conn. Gen. Stat. 52-598 prints four different durations, and all four run from the same event: the date the judgment was entered.
| What the deadline governs | How long | Runs from | Provision |
|---|---|---|---|
| Issuing an execution on a Superior Court money judgment | 20 years | The date the judgment was entered | 52-598(a) |
| Bringing a fresh action on that judgment | 25 years | The date the judgment was entered | 52-598(a) |
| Issuing an execution on a small claims judgment | 10 years | The date the judgment was entered | 52-598(b) |
| Bringing an action on a small claims judgment | 15 years | The date the judgment was entered | 52-598(b) |
| Moving to revive the judgment | Any time before the applicable period above expires | Filing of the motion | 52-598(c) |
Read the section as a whole and the shape is unusual. Connecticut does not make a judgment go dormant, does not require a periodic renewal to keep it alive, and does not let anything be resurrected once a wall is reached. Instead it sets a hard stop on execution at twenty years and a second, later stop on suing at twenty-five – so for five years there is a Connecticut judgment that can still found a new action but can no longer be executed on. The revival motion under subsection (c) has to be filed inside the window, which means a creditor who discovers the problem at year twenty-one has not lost a procedural step, but the remedy. One carve-out sits outside all of it: where the judgment is for personal injury caused by sexual assault and the party legally at fault was convicted under section 53a-70 or 53a-70a, the statute says there is no time limitation at all on the execution or the action. The durations row for every state sits on our how long a judgment stays good by state index; the four numbers above are what sits underneath Connecticut's row.
The Town Clerk, Not the County
Connecticut has no county government, so the judgment lien on land is recorded town by town – and one clause in the statute can move its priority date backwards.
Nothing about a Connecticut money judgment touches real estate on its own. Under Conn. Gen. Stat. 52-380a(a) the creditor creates the lien by recording a judgment lien certificate in the town clerk's office in the town where the land lies. The certificate is signed by the creditor, the creditor's attorney or a personal representative, and the statute itemises what it has to contain: the names and last-known addresses of both parties, the court and the date the judgment was rendered, the original amount and the amount still due, and a description of the property – which, the section says in terms, need not be by metes and bounds.
Because Connecticut's land records are municipal rather than county, a debtor who owns in Greenwich, Manchester and Torrington is three recordings, not one filing. Every parcel has to be found before any of it can be recorded against, which is the part of this that is a research problem rather than a legal one.
Subsection (b) is where the drafting gets genuinely unusual. The lien ordinarily attaches from the time the certificate is recorded. But if the lien is placed within four months of judgment on land that was already attached in the same action, the lien holds from the date of the attachment – months or years earlier, ahead of anything recorded in between. The catch is that the statute does not merely permit the relation-back, it prints the sentence the certificate has to carry: a clause referring to and identifying the attachment, "substantially in the following form: This lien is filed within four months after judgment in the action was rendered and relates back to an attachment of real property recorded on (month) (day) (year), at Volume ___ Page ___ of the ___ land records." Omit the recital and the four months buy nothing.
Under 52-380a(c) a Connecticut judgment lien on real property is foreclosed or redeemed in the same manner as a mortgage – it is not a wait-and-see encumbrance that sits until a sale. That is a real remedy and also a real cost, and subsection (d) attaches conditions to it in consumer cases that are dealt with further down this page. How the recording step differs state by state is summarised on our judgment lien guide by state; Connecticut's row there is the one-line version of this section.
The Order You Cannot Skip
Every guide to Connecticut collection lists the wage execution as one of five options. Read 52-361a(a) and it is not an option at all.
Conn. Gen. Stat. 52-361a(a) opens with a condition, not a grant: "If a judgment debtor fails to comply with an installment payment order, the judgment creditor may apply to the court for a wage execution." The application itself has to set out the particulars of the installment payment order and of the debtor's failure to comply. There is no route in that section to a wage execution for a debtor who simply has not paid a judgment. What the statute punishes is the breach of a court order.
The obvious objection – that a creditor cannot make a debtor accept a payment plan – is answered two sections earlier, and it is the piece the ranking pages leave out. Under 52-356d(a) either party may move for an installment payment order, and the court sets it after hearing and considering the debtor's finances. But 52-356d(c) says that notwithstanding the hearing requirement, on the creditor's motion for an order of nominal payments the court shall issue it ex parte, without hearing. The amount that counts as nominal is set by the judges of the Superior Court. So the creditor can obtain, without the debtor appearing, the order whose breach later unlocks the wage execution.
Two consequences follow that most summaries invert. First, compliance protects the debtor: under 52-356d(b), in a consumer judgment the court may provide that keeping to the installment order stays any property execution or foreclosure – so a debtor who pays the nominal amount can hold off the harder remedies. Nominal orders are carved out of that protection. Second, the order is deliberately toothless on its own face: 52-356d(d) says an installment payment order shall not be enforced by contempt proceedings. The sole sanction the legislature attached to breaking it is the wage execution. That is why the sequence, not the remedy list, is the thing worth understanding.
What comes out of the paycheck once the execution issues – the ceiling on disposable earnings, the multiple of the Connecticut minimum wage that is protected, and the twenty-day window in which the debtor can file an exemption claim – is set out in detail on our Connecticut wage garnishment laws page. This page is about how a creditor becomes entitled to reach that point at all.
What Each Execution Costs and How Long It Lives
Three executions, three different internal deadlines, and the same application fee on each.
| Execution | What it reaches | The deadline inside it | Fee / provision |
|---|---|---|---|
| Property execution | Non-exempt personal property other than bank debts and earnings | Returned to court within four months of issuance; the statute adds that an untimely return does not of itself invalidate it | $105 · 52-356a |
| Bank execution | Debts due from a financial institution to an individual debtor | The serving officer must make demand within seven days of receiving the execution | $105 · 52-367b |
| Wage execution | Earnings due or becoming due, until the judgment is satisfied | Automatically stayed 20 days on service on the employer, then a lien and continuing levy; an exemption claim filed inside those 20 days continues the stay until it is decided | $105 · 52-361a |
| Judgment lien on land | The debtor's interest in real property in the town of recording | Four months from judgment to capture an earlier attachment's priority | Recording · 52-380a |
Each fee is recoverable by the creditor as a taxable cost of the action, which matters when a file needs several attempts. The service side is not done by the creditor: Connecticut executions are served and levied by a state marshal, and both the property and bank executions are directed to a levying officer rather than to the debtor. A marshal needs an address to serve, an employer to serve, or a named financial institution to demand from – which is why an execution issued into an unknown is simply a $105 receipt. The Connecticut Judicial Branch keeps a pathfinder on enforcing money judgments that indexes the forms and the chapter; the exemption schedule those executions run into is on our Connecticut asset exemptions page. If the underlying judgment came out of a small claims session, note that its ten-year execution wall is half the Superior Court figure – our guide to enforcing a small claims judgment covers that posture.
Hospital Debt Runs on a Parallel Statute
Connecticut wrote a second, slower track into the same sections. If the judgment arose out of services provided at a hospital, four rules change.
The first change is the interest rate. Conn. Gen. Stat. 37-3a(a) caps postjudgment interest at ten per cent a year "and no more". Subsection (b) then says that in the case of a debt arising out of services provided at a hospital, pre- and postjudgment interest shall be no more than five per cent per year, and adds that the awarding of interest in such cases is discretionary. On a judgment carried for a decade that halving is most of the balance.
The second change is that the installment-order stay stops being discretionary. Under 52-356d(b) the court may stay execution while a consumer debtor keeps to an installment order – but for a judgment arising out of hospital services the court shall provide that compliance stays any property execution or foreclosure, and the statute spells out that this includes execution on wages, execution on bank accounts, and execution on or foreclosure of real property.
The third change is a three-step precondition on the property execution itself. Under 52-356a(a)(1), where the judgment arises out of hospital services no application may even be made until the court has (A) issued an order for installment payments under 52-356d, (B) made a finding that the debtor has defaulted on payments under that order, and (C) lifted the mandatory stay. The court then decides whether to modify the plan, continue it, or lift the stay – three separate judicial acts before a marshal is instructed.
The fourth is a disclosure duty rather than a delay: in a consumer judgment the property-execution application has to state whether a 52-356d(b) stay was entered and, if so, carry the creditor's statement about the debtor's default. Taken together this is not a footnote. A Connecticut medical judgment is a different collection instrument from a Connecticut commercial one, and a creditor who prices the two the same way will be wrong about both the timeline and the yield.
Interest Does Not Simply Accrue
The one Connecticut point that catches experienced creditors: an installment payment order does not switch postjudgment interest on.
Conn. Gen. Stat. 52-350f is the enabling section – a money judgment may be enforced to the amount of the judgment together with statutory costs and fees, interest as provided by chapter 673, and any attorney's fees allowed under 52-400c. Chapter 673 is where 37-3a sits, and the ten per cent there is a ceiling, not an entitlement: the Appellate Court has held that the section does not mandate an award of postjudgment interest, which remains discretionary.
Section 52-356d(e) then says that interest on a money judgment shall continue to accrue under any installment payment order on the portion that remains unpaid – and that sentence has been read, more than once, as making interest automatic wherever a payment plan exists. It does not. In Ballou v. Law Offices Howard Lee Schiff, P.C., 304 Conn. 348 (2012), the Supreme Court answered the certified question directly: 52-356d(e) does not provide for the automatic accrual of postjudgment interest on all judgments in which an installment payment order has been entered. The creditor still has to request interest under 37-3a, and the court still has to allow it.
The practical effect on a Connecticut file is that two identical judgments entered on the same day can be worth materially different amounts a decade later, purely on whether interest was ever asked for and granted. When a file is picked up cold – assigned, inherited, or dusted off before the twenty-year wall – the balance stated on the original judgment is not the balance, and the docket has to be read for what was actually ordered.
Where a Connecticut File Actually Stalls
Every one of these is a factual gap rather than a legal one, which is the part we work on.
No employer, so the gate leads nowhere
A nominal installment order can be obtained ex parte and the debtor can duly default on it, and the resulting wage execution still has nowhere to go. Conn. Gen. Stat. 52-361a(c)(6) expects the creditor to supply information identifying the employer. Without a current, verified employer the whole sequence terminates in paper.
Land held in a town nobody checked
Because Connecticut records liens municipally, a certificate recorded in the town where the debtor lives does nothing about the two-family the debtor owns three towns over. Missing parcels are the most common unforced error we see on Connecticut files.
The four months ran while the file sat
The relation-back in 52-380a(b) is worth whatever priority sits between the attachment and the recording – and it expires four months after judgment. Files that move to collection slowly lose it silently.
A bank named wrongly, or not at all
52-367b(b)(1) turns on demand at the main office in the serving officer’s county, or on a designated branch employee, or by certified mail for an out-of-state institution. Each of those needs the institution identified correctly before a marshal is instructed.
A judgment approaching a wall nobody dated
The twenty-year execution wall and the twenty-five-year action wall both run from entry, and the revival motion has to be filed before the wall, not after. Old files routinely have an assumed entry date rather than a confirmed one.
The debtor is out of state and the docket has not moved
A Connecticut judgment against someone now living elsewhere needs to be taken to the new state, and that begins with knowing which state. See judgment debtor location for how that search is structured.
How We Work a Connecticut Matter
We do the factual layer. Counsel and the state marshal do the legal and enforcement layers.
You send the judgment and what you already know
The case caption, the court and the date of entry, the amount, and whatever identifiers you hold for the debtor. The date of entry matters more in Connecticut than in most states because all four of the 52-598 deadlines run from it.
We confirm identity before anything else
Common names in a small state produce confident, wrong matches. We resolve the person to a verified current address and a documented history before any asset work begins, because a certificate recorded against the wrong Robert Sullivan is a problem, not a lien.
We map the towns, not the county
Real property is searched municipality by municipality across the state, since a Connecticut lien certificate only reaches the town where it is recorded. We report every parcel we can document and where it sits.
We identify the employer and the deposit relationships
The gate in 52-361a is only worth walking through if there is a payroll at the end of it. We research current employment and financial relationships from lawful sources so counsel can decide whether the installment-order route is worth its filing fees.
You get a first read within 24 hours
On most Connecticut files we can tell you within 24 hours whether the debtor is locatable and whether there is anything recorded worth pursuing. That is deliberately the first thing we report, because it is the answer that decides whether the rest of the spend is justified.
You get a written file counsel can act on
Addresses, employment, business interests, recorded property and the documentary basis for each. We do not opine on which Connecticut remedy to use and we do not serve anything – a state marshal levies here, and your attorney decides the strategy.
What We Supply, and What a State Marshal Does
The boundary is worth stating in Connecticut’s own terms, because the statute assigns each job to somebody.
We are a public-records and skip-tracing research firm. Nobody on this team holds a Connecticut private investigator's licence and this page does not imply that we do; we do not describe ourselves as investigators. The levying officer in Connecticut is a state marshal, appointed for the purpose, and the applications under 52-356a, 52-361a and 52-367b are made by the creditor or the creditor's attorney. We are none of those. What we supply is the factual layer those filings depend on – who the debtor is, where they are, where they work, and what they own.
Every search we run is opened only after a purpose the law permits has been stated and recorded, and enforcing a judgment already entered by a Connecticut court is one of the clearest. We work from public records and lawfully available data. Impersonation is not a technique we use: no call to a town clerk, an employer or a bank here begins with a false identity, and we do not disguise whose enquiry it is. A Connecticut file that would only stand up so long as the research behind it stayed concealed is not one we want.
A separate boundary is worth stating because it is federal rather than Connecticut's. This firm is not a credit bureau. What a marshal or an attorney gets from us is locating and asset research; it has not been compiled as a consumer report, it carries no eligibility scoring, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act keeps it out of any decision about lending to, insuring, employing or housing the person it concerns. Those calls need a regulated bureau's file.
Connecticut's postjudgment chapter is unusual in naming a class of victim on its face: 52-598(a) strips every time limit off a judgment for personal injury caused by sexual assault where the party legally at fault was convicted. We take the corollary seriously. If the person we are being asked to find is a victim of that kind of harm, has fled an abusive situation, or is shielded by a protective order or a no-contact order, we decline the file and say why. Locating that person could harm them, and an entered judgment is not a reason to override the fact that somebody does not want to be found. Where safety is genuinely in question the route is counsel and, where appropriate, the court – not a research vendor.
Everything on this page is general information about Connecticut law and is not legal advice. Whether a particular remedy is available on a particular judgment is a question for a Connecticut attorney reading your file.
Who We Help Collect
Creditors and counsel holding a Connecticut judgment that has stopped moving.
Judgment creditors and assignees
Holders of a Superior Court or small claims judgment that has gone quiet, including files bought or assigned where the entry date and the interest history both need re-establishing.
Collection and creditors'-rights counsel
Firms that need the employer, the deposit relationship and the parcel list before deciding whether to spend $105 on an execution or a recording fee on a certificate.
Commercial creditors and suppliers
Trade creditors chasing a Connecticut business debtor, including successor entities and principals with recorded property in other towns.
Landlords holding money judgments
Property owners with an entered damages judgment against a former tenant who has since moved. We locate the person and research assets; we do not screen applicants or evaluate anyone's suitability for a tenancy.
Family-law and support enforcement counsel
Where a Connecticut money judgment sits alongside other orders and the obligor's current address and employment are the missing facts.
Out-of-state creditors with a Connecticut debtor
Creditors who need to know whether a debtor is actually in Connecticut before spending on domestication, and where in Connecticut.
If you are earlier in the process and only need to know whether a judgment exists against someone, our guide to finding out if someone has a civil judgment is the better starting point. If the debtor has already left the state, start with skip tracing.
Our Commitment
If we cannot document a current Connecticut address, an employer, or a recorded parcel for the debtor you name, we tell you that plainly rather than filling a report with maybes. A Connecticut execution costs $105 and a marshal’s time before it reaches anything, so a thin answer that is honest is worth more to you than a thick one that is not.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long is a Connecticut judgment good for?
Conn. Gen. Stat. 52-598 sets four deadlines, all running from the date the judgment was entered. No execution may issue on a Superior Court money judgment after 20 years, and no action based on that judgment may be brought after 25 years. For a small claims judgment the figures are 10 years and 15 years. A motion to revive the judgment must be filed before the applicable period expires. This is general information, not legal advice.
Can a Connecticut creditor get a wage execution just because the judgment is unpaid?
No. Conn. Gen. Stat. 52-361a(a) makes the wage execution available only where the judgment debtor has failed to comply with an installment payment order, and the application must set out the particulars of that order and of the failure. Non-payment of the judgment itself is not the trigger; breach of the court’s payment order is.
Then how does a creditor get an installment payment order in the first place?
Under Conn. Gen. Stat. 52-356d(c), on the judgment creditor’s motion for an order of nominal payments the court shall issue that order ex parte, without a hearing, in an amount the judges of the Superior Court set. Section 52-356d(a) provides the ordinary route, after hearing and consideration of the debtor’s finances.
Where do I record a judgment lien on Connecticut real estate?
In the town clerk’s office in the town where the land lies – Connecticut has no county land records. Conn. Gen. Stat. 52-380a(a) requires a judgment lien certificate stating the parties’ names and last-known addresses, the court and date of the judgment, the original amount and the amount due, and a description of the property, which the statute says need not be by metes and bounds.
What is the four-month rule on a Connecticut judgment lien?
Under 52-380a(b) a lien recorded within four months of judgment on property that was already attached in the action holds from the date of that attachment rather than from recording – but only if the certificate contains the recital clause the statute prints, identifying the attachment and its volume and page in the land records.
Does interest run automatically on a Connecticut judgment?
No. Conn. Gen. Stat. 37-3a(a) caps postjudgment interest at ten per cent a year and no more, and the award is discretionary. In Ballou v. Law Offices Howard Lee Schiff, P.C., 304 Conn. 348 (2012), the Supreme Court held that 52-356d(e) does not make postjudgment interest accrue automatically on every judgment carrying an installment payment order.
Is a Connecticut hospital-debt judgment collected differently?
Yes, on four points. Interest is capped at five per cent a year and is discretionary under 37-3a(b); compliance with an installment order stays execution and foreclosure mandatorily rather than at the court’s discretion under 52-356d(b); and under 52-356a(a)(1) no property execution may be applied for until the court has issued an installment order, found a default, and lifted the mandatory stay.
What do you actually supply on a Connecticut file, and what do you not?
We supply the factual layer: verified identity and current address, employment, business interests and recorded real property mapped town by town, with the documentary basis for each. We do not garnish, levy or serve anything – a Connecticut state marshal does that – and we do not advise which remedy to use. That is your attorney’s call.
Find the Facts a Connecticut Execution Needs
Send us the judgment and what you know about the debtor. We come back with verified identity, current address, employment and a town-by-town property picture – the inputs your attorney and a state marshal both need before anything is filed.
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