Delaware Judgment Collection
Delaware keeps a money judgment’s grip on land for ten years and then asks the creditor to do something unusual to keep it. Under 10 Del. C. 4711 the lien may be renewed by a written agreement in a form the statute writes out – “It is agreed that the lien of this judgment shall be extended for the term of 10 years” – but that agreement has to be signed by the plaintiff and by the defendant, and, to reach land the defendant has since conveyed by recorded deed, by the terre tenant as well. A creditor who cannot get those signatures is left with 10 Del. C. 4715: a writ of scire facias directed to the sheriff, commanding him to make known to the defendant and the terre tenants that they appear and show cause why the lien should not stand renewed. Both routes are, before they are anything else, a problem of finding people. That is the part we do. Our own part is research alone: Delaware county and court records and lawfully licensed data, opened only where a requester has first given a reason the law allows. No one at this firm is a licensed private investigator, admitted to the Delaware bar, or in the business of collecting, and describing a chapter of the code is not advising on your judgment.
Two Ways to Keep the Lien, and Only One of Them Is Yours Alone
10 Del. C. 4711 and 4715 are the whole of it. There is no third route.
| Route | What it takes | What it produces |
|---|---|---|
| Agreement 10 Del. C. 4711(a) | A written agreement signed by the plaintiff – or the assignee, or the person to whose use the judgment has been marked, or their executors or administrators – and by the defendant, and, to bind land the defendant has conveyed away by recorded deed since the judgment, by the terre tenant of that land. Attorneys of record for the respective parties may sign instead. It is filed with the prothonotary and minuted and certified on the record. | A further ten years, immediately from the minuting and certifying. Consensual |
| Scire facias 10 Del. C. 4715 | A writ issued against the defendant and the terre tenant of the real estate bound by the lien, directed to the sheriff of the county in which it issues, commanding him to make known to them that they appear and show cause why the lien should not be renewed and continued and execution not issue. Practice, pleadings and procedure conform as nearly as may be to other writs of scire facias on judgments. | On final judgment for the plaintiff, the lien stands renewed for ten years from the entry of the scire facias judgment, with execution during that term. |
Read the first row again, because it is the part that surprises people. The quick route in Delaware is a bargain, not a filing. A judgment creditor cannot swear an affidavit and extend the lien the way a creditor in a renewal state does; the defendant has to put his name to it. In practice that happens where there is a payment plan, a forbearance, or a refinancing the debtor wants more than he wants the lien to lapse. Where none of that is on the table, the creditor is on the second row.
And the second row is a service problem. A writ of scire facias is only as good as the sheriff’s ability to make the writ known, and it has to be made known not only to the defendant but to the terre tenants – the people who now own land the defendant once owned. Those are two different research questions, and only one of them is answered by looking for the debtor.
4712 then makes the arithmetic generous. Once the agreement is minuted and certified, or final judgment is entered in the scire facias, the lien runs a further ten years; and in like manner and with like effect it may be renewed again before the extended term expires, “and so from time to time as often as is found necessary.” Delaware does not cap the number of renewals. It caps the ease of getting one.
The Short Version
A Delaware money judgment binds land from the moment it is actually entered or signed, and holds it for ten years. The hold can be extended indefinitely, but only two ways: an agreement the judgment debtor signs and the prothonotary certifies on the record, or a writ of scire facias served on the debtor and on whoever now owns land the debtor has conveyed away. Let the ten years run out and the lien is lost; revive it afterwards and it binds only from the revival, with no relation back and no effect on anyone who bought, lent or docketed in the meantime. Every one of those steps starts with knowing where the debtor is and what the county records show in the name – which is the work this page describes.
The Clock Starts at Signing. Sometimes It Starts Later.
Two sections give the trigger, and the second one has an exception nobody quotes.
10 Del. C. 4702 is one sentence and it exists to abolish something: “A judgment shall bind lands only from the time of actually entering or signing it, and not by relation from the first day of the term in or of which it is entered.” That negative is worth dwelling on, because the doctrine it rejects is alive elsewhere. In West Virginia a judgment lien can relate back to the commencement of the term at which the judgment was rendered. Delaware looked at that rule and legislated it away. Here the binding date is the date of the act, and 4703 and 4704 tidy up the edges – a judgment on a verdict entered before the end of the next term binds as of the verdict, and a judgment whose amount is to be ascertained binds from entry only if the ascertained amount reaches the docket before the first day of the next term.
Then 4711(a) states the ten years, and states them twice over. The lien continues for no longer than ten years “next following the day of entry or recording of such judgment” – or, where the whole or any part of the money is not due and payable at or before entry or recording, ten years from “the day on which such money shall have become wholly due and payable.” That second limb is genuinely useful and it is almost never mentioned. A judgment entered on an obligation that matures in instalments does not necessarily begin its ten years on the day it was entered; it can begin them on the day the last of the money fell due. A creditor who calendars from entry alone may be writing off a lien that has years left in it.
4705 and 4706 settle priority between judgments entered the same day – the first entered has priority, and where the entries do not show which came first, priority follows the dates of the actions in which they were given – so the docket, not the argument, decides. 4707 keeps justice of the peace and Court of Common Pleas judgments outside those particular rules, and 4708 gives a Supreme Court judgment on reversal a twenty-day window to reach the Superior Court docket before its lien date slips.
Watch: Why Delaware Renewals Start With People
The signature you need, and the landowner you have to find.
Watch Overview
“Terre Tenant” Is a Defined Term, and It Decides Who Must Be Found
10 Del. C. 4701 defines it in eighteen words, and both renewal routes turn on it.
Delaware’s judgments chapter opens with a definition rather than a rule. Under 10 Del. C. 4701, a terre tenant is “the grantee of real estate to whom the same has been conveyed, as appears by the last conveyance of the same of record.” It is a phrase most creditors meet for the first time when they try to renew, and it is not decoration: 4711(a) requires the terre tenant’s signature to bind conveyed land, and 4715 requires the writ to run against him.
Notice what the definition keys to. Not who lives there, not who pays the tax bill, not who the debtor says owns it – the grantee as shown by the last recorded conveyance. That is a records question with a records answer, and it is answerable county by county in Kent, New Castle and Sussex from the recorder of deeds’ indices. It is also a question that gets harder the longer it is left, because each further conveyance moves the target. A creditor who identifies the terre tenants in year two has a manageable list; one who starts in year nine may be tracing a chain of title through parties who have themselves moved out of state.
The consequence of missing the deadline is set out in 10 Del. C. 4714, and it is severe in a specific way rather than a general one. Where the lien is lost or interrupted and the judgment is afterwards revived by scire facias, the revived judgment is a lien on the defendant’s real estate from the time of such revival; the section says in terms that the lien “shall not relate back”, nor shall it in any manner affect any prior bona fide purchaser or mortgagee from, or judgment creditor of, the defendant or the terre tenant. So a lapse does not merely cost time. It resets the creditor’s place in the queue behind everyone who recorded during the gap, and in a state where a mortgage refinancing is routine, that queue is rarely empty.
4713 supplies the hard stop on the enforcement side: no real estate is to be seized or taken by execution on a money judgment after the ten years, and at the expiry the lien on real estate is lost unless it was renewed within the term. 4716(a) carves out the one saving case – the subchapter does not defeat the due enforcement of a writ of execution by virtue of which real estate is seized if that writ issued before the ten years expired – and puts judgments upon a mortgage or a mechanic’s lien outside the chapter altogether.
Two Subsections Added in 2022 That Run on a Different Event Entirely
83 Del. Laws c. 497 put restitution and criminal-judgment liens on a seven-year clock keyed to a sale.
Anyone working a Delaware docket that mixes civil and criminal judgments needs 4711(c) and (d), because they do not follow the ten years at all. Subsection (c) takes judgments entered of record pursuant to court-ordered restitution awards under 11 Del. C. 4101(b) outside the section, and then imposes its own limit: no such judgment will attach to a parcel of real property for more than seven years after the convicted person has sold, transferred, or lost their ownership interest in that specific parcel.
Subsection (d) does the same for the automatic lien on real property derived from a criminal judgment filed with the prothonotary: unless extended by the 4715 procedure or by the express conditions of a criminal sentencing order, it expires seven years from the date the convicted person sold, transferred or lost their ownership interest in that parcel – while the criminal judgment’s personal liability against the defendant remains valid and enforceable even if the lien on real property is removed. The subsection applies to liens derived from criminal judgments filed after 21 October 2022, and to earlier ones if extended under 4715 by 22 October 2023.
The drafting is unusual and worth naming precisely, because it inverts the normal question. Everywhere else in this chapter the clock runs from something the court did. Here it runs from something the debtor did – a sale or transfer of a particular parcel – and it runs parcel by parcel rather than judgment by judgment. Establishing when a specific parcel changed hands is therefore not background colour; it is the date the seven years are measured from, and it lives in the recorder of deeds’ index rather than in the court file.
What We Establish, and What We Do Not Touch
Sourced facts with dates. The filings and the judgment calls belong to counsel.
Everything above is general information about how Delaware’s judgments chapter reads. None of it is a view about any particular judgment, and this firm would not be the right source for one. Nobody here files a renewal agreement with a prothonotary, sues out a writ of scire facias, directs a sheriff, forms a view about whether a conveyance was bona fide, or approaches a judgment debtor about money. Those are acts for lawyers, sheriffs and the Superior Court. What we do is narrower and it is the part that both of Delaware’s renewal routes actually depend on: establishing, from records, who and where the people are.
Concretely, that means a current address and identity confirmation for a judgment debtor; the Delaware counties in which property is recorded in the debtor’s name; and, where land has been conveyed away since the judgment, the grantee shown by the last conveyance of record – the terre tenant 4701 defines and 4715 requires the writ to reach. Each finding is delivered with the source and the date it was checked, so counsel can decide what to do with it rather than take our word for it.
Access is conditional. A Delaware file is opened for us only where the requester has first identified a reason the law recognises – a judgment to enforce, a party to serve, an asset to identify – and it is worked from Delaware public records and lawfully licensed data. What we will not do to obtain a fact is as fixed as what we will: no pretext, no assumed identity, and no misdescription of who is asking, whether the counter belongs to a prothonotary, a recorder of deeds or a payroll department. This firm claims no Delaware investigative licence, is not a licensed private investigator, does not practise law, does not act as a collection agency, and never speaks to a debtor for a creditor.
Two boundaries hold without exception, and both are worth stating before a file is opened rather than after. This firm is not a consumer reporting agency and its findings are not consumer reports – they are not put together or handed over so that a tenancy, a hiring or promotion, or an extension of credit or insurance can be decided, and a requester who needs that is declined and redirected to a screening provider regulated to supply it. And where a request looks like an attempt to reach someone who has separated from a former partner, holds a protective order, or would otherwise be exposed to harm by being found, it is refused at the outset and the refusal explained, however the paperwork is presented. A Delaware judgment number does not move either line.
Where an enquiry crosses a state line – and Delaware judgments frequently do, given how many defendants are entities organised here and resident elsewhere – the sequence is a domestication question first. Our note on domesticating a judgment in another state sets out that order of operations, and the broader judgment collection by state index shows how the ten years here compare with the rules next door.
Three Dates Worth Calendaring on Any Delaware Judgment
None of them is the date the file was opened.
The binding date. Under 4702 it is the day the judgment was actually entered or signed – not the first day of the term, and not the date of the verdict except in the 4703 case. That is the date the ten years count from under 4711(a), unless the money was not wholly due at entry, in which case the count starts when it became wholly due. Getting this wrong in either direction is expensive: too early and a creditor abandons a live lien, too late and the lien is gone before the diary says so.
NDThe renewal window. Both routes must be completed within the ten years. 4711(a) does give one piece of shelter: if a writ of scire facias is sued out before the ten years expire and the term runs out while the proceedings are pending, the lien continues until the court finally determines the parties’ rights, or until the scire facias is discontinued or dismissed. And where final judgment on the scire facias goes against the plaintiff and is then reversed on appeal, the lien is restored and continued – except as against a bona fide purchaser, mortgagee or judgment creditor who became such after the adverse Superior Court judgment and before the taking of the appeal was noted on the record.
The conveyance date, for any land already gone. That is the date the terre tenant became the terre tenant, and it decides who has to sign or be served. It is also, for restitution and criminal judgment liens under 4711(c) and (d), the date the seven years run from.
A general point about the arithmetic on this page: it is worth checking what other sources say about Delaware, because they frequently describe it as a state where a judgment is kept alive by periodic execution. Nothing in chapter 47 makes reissuing an execution extend a lien. 4711 extends it by agreement or scire facias, and 4716(a) merely preserves an execution that had already issued. If a summary tells you to keep the file warm by executing every few years, it is describing some other state’s rule. Our comparison of how long a judgment stays good in each state is the place to check the neighbouring answers, and renewing an old judgment before it expires covers the mechanics generally.
Our Commitment
We tell you what the Delaware records establish, what they only suggest, and what they do not reach at all – with the source and the date beside each finding. If the county indices and the licensed data do not support a conclusion, we say so rather than dress up an inference, and we will tell you when further work is unlikely to change the answer.
Delaware Judgment Questions
How long does a Delaware judgment lien last?
Ten years. Under 10 Del. C. 4711(a) a money judgment entered or recorded in the Superior Court continues a lien on real estate for no longer than ten years next following the day of entry or recording – or, where the money was not wholly due and payable at or before that day, ten years from the day it became wholly due and payable. 4713 adds that no real estate may be seized by execution after the ten years and that the lien is lost at expiry unless renewed within the term.
Can a Delaware judgment lien be renewed more than once?
Yes, without a stated limit. 10 Del. C. 4712 provides that after a renewal is minuted and certified the lien continues for a further ten years, and that in like manner it may be renewed again before the extended term expires, and so from time to time as often as is found necessary. What Delaware limits is not the number of renewals but how one is obtained.
Why does a Delaware renewal agreement need the debtor’s signature?
Because 4711(a) says so. The agreement route requires signature by the plaintiff or those standing in the plaintiff’s shoes and by the defendant or the defendant’s executors or administrators, with the terre tenant’s signature as well where the aim is to bind land the defendant has conveyed away by recorded deed; attorneys of record may sign for their respective parties. A creditor who cannot obtain those signatures uses the scire facias route in 4715 instead.
What is a terre tenant, and why does it matter?
10 Del. C. 4701 defines a terre tenant as the grantee of real estate to whom it has been conveyed, as appears by the last conveyance of the same of record. It matters because both renewal routes reach him: 4711(a) needs his signature to bind land the defendant has conveyed since the judgment, and 4715 directs the writ of scire facias against him as well as against the defendant. Identifying him is a question for the county land records.
What happens if a Delaware judgment lien lapses and is revived later?
Under 10 Del. C. 4714 the revived judgment is a lien on the defendant’s real estate from the time of the revival. The section states that the lien shall not relate back and shall not in any manner affect any prior bona fide purchaser or mortgagee from, or judgment creditor of, the defendant or the terre tenant. A lapse therefore costs priority as well as time.
Does issuing an execution extend a Delaware judgment lien?
No. Chapter 47 extends the lien by the 4711(a) agreement or by scire facias under 4715, and by nothing else. 4716(a) provides only that the subchapter does not defeat the enforcement of a writ of execution by which real estate is seized where that writ issued before the ten years expired – which preserves an execution already under way rather than extending the lien.
Do restitution and criminal judgment liens follow the same ten years?
No. 10 Del. C. 4711(c) and (d), added by 83 Del. Laws c. 497, run seven years from the date the convicted person sold, transferred or lost an ownership interest in the specific parcel, subject to extension under 4715 or the express conditions of a sentencing order. Subsection (d) applies to liens derived from criminal judgments filed with the prothonotary after 21 October 2022, and to earlier ones extended under 4715 by 22 October 2023. Personal liability on the criminal judgment survives removal of the lien.
What can your firm do on a Delaware judgment, and what will it not do?
We establish, from Delaware public records and lawfully licensed data, where a judgment debtor is, which counties hold recorded property in the name, and who the last recorded conveyance shows as the owner of land conveyed away since the judgment – each with its source and date. Outside that, the answer is no: no renewal agreements, no writs, no instructions to a sheriff, no advice, and no contact with the debtor. We are not investigators under licence, not counsel, and not collectors. Neither is this a consumer reporting agency, so nothing it produces may be used to screen a tenant, decide a hiring or promotion, or underwrite credit; and a request that appears aimed at someone who would be endangered by being located is refused.
Both Renewals Begin With a Name and an Address.
One Delaware renewal needs the defendant’s signature; the other needs a sheriff to reach the defendant and every terre tenant of land he has conveyed since entry. Give us the debtor’s details and a lawful reason to look, and you will get back a located person and a list of the Delaware counties recording property in that name – sourced, and in most cases within 24 hours. Contact us and we will tell you plainly what the records can and cannot settle.
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