Florida Wage Garnishment Laws
Florida is one of the hardest states in the country to garnish wages, and the reason is a single state statute that most out-of-state collection playbooks ignore. A creditor who wins a money judgment here cannot simply send a writ to the debtor’s payroll department the way they might elsewhere. Florida’s head-of-family exemption can shield a working parent’s entire paycheck, no matter how high the income, unless the debtor signed it away in advance. This guide explains exactly how the exemption works under Florida Statute section 222.11, where the federal twenty-five-percent ceiling still applies, the writ-of-garnishment procedure and its deadlines, and why locating where someone actually banks and works is the part of judgment enforcement that decides whether you ever collect.
The Short Version
Florida layers a strong state exemption on top of the federal wage-garnishment cap. A debtor who is “head of family” – the status most people and most Florida lawyers call “head of household” – is treated very differently from one who is not. Head of family means providing more than half the support of a child or other dependent. If a head of family’s disposable earnings are $750 a week or less, every dollar is exempt and cannot be garnished by an ordinary creditor at all. Earnings above that weekly figure are still exempt unless the debtor agreed in writing, in advance, to allow the garnishment. A debtor who is not head of family falls back to the federal formula – the lesser of twenty-five percent of disposable earnings or the amount over thirty times the federal minimum wage. Either way, after a writ issues the debtor has twenty days to file a sworn claim of exemption, and child support and certain tax debts follow their own rules entirely. Florida also prices the attempt before it prices the recovery: under Fla. Stat. 77.28 the creditor who applies for the writ owes the garnishee $100 on demand whether the writ collects a cent or not. Because the wage route is so often blocked here, the practical question for a Florida judgment creditor is rarely the law – it is finding the right employer, the right bank, and the non-exempt assets. That locate is what we do.
Watch: Florida Wage Garnishment
How the head-of-family exemption changes everything.
Watch Overview
The One Rule That Defines Florida
Everything about garnishing wages here turns on a single status.
Most states let an ordinary judgment creditor garnish a slice of almost any employee’s paycheck. Florida does not work that way, and the difference is Florida Statute section 222.11, the head-of-family exemption. The statute asks one threshold question before anything else: is the debtor the head of a family? The answer reroutes the entire analysis, because a head of family enjoys a protection so broad that it can shield an entire paycheck from creditors regardless of how large that paycheck is.
Under the statute, “head of family” means any natural person who provides more than one-half of the support for a child or other dependent. That is a support test, not a marital-status test – a single parent, an adult supporting an aging relative, or a spouse who is the household’s primary earner can all qualify. A note on vocabulary: section 222.11 says head of family, while searchers, payroll departments and most Florida practitioners say head of household. In Florida garnishment they are the same status, and “head of family” is the phrase the statute and the court order will use. Because the test is arithmetic – more than one-half of a particular dependent’s support – two people cannot both meet it for the same dependent, so spouses cannot both shelter wages on the strength of the same child. That follows from the “more than one-half” language rather than from a separate sentence in the statute, and it does not stop two earners in one home from each qualifying where each supports a different dependent. The label sounds quaint, but in Florida it is the most consequential word in the entire garnishment process, and getting it wrong is how out-of-state creditors waste a year chasing a paycheck they were never going to reach.
The statute also defines the figure it operates on. Disposable earnings are the part of a person’s earnings left after subtracting the amounts the law requires the employer to withhold – federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare, and the like. Voluntary deductions such as retirement contributions or health-plan buy-ups do not reduce disposable earnings. That definition matters, because both the Florida exemption and the federal cap are measured against disposable earnings rather than gross pay.
The Seven-Hundred-Fifty Weekly Threshold
Where the line sits, and what crossing it actually changes.
Section 222.11 splits head-of-family debtors into two groups using a single weekly number. If a head of family’s disposable earnings are $750 a week or less, all of those earnings are exempt from attachment or garnishment. Not a percentage of them – all of them. An ordinary creditor with a valid Florida judgment cannot reach one dollar of that paycheck through wage garnishment. This is the protection that surprises creditors who assume the federal twenty-five-percent rule sets a national floor; in Florida, for a lower-earning head of family, the floor is zero.
Earnings above the weekly threshold are where the second, less obvious rule lives. Disposable earnings of a head of family that are greater than $750 a week may not be garnished unless the debtor has agreed otherwise in writing. Read that carefully: the income over the line is not automatically fair game. It remains exempt by default, and a creditor can reach it only if the debtor signed a written agreement consenting to the garnishment. There is no income ceiling on the protection – a head of family earning $2,000 a week is shielded on the same terms as one earning five hundred, absent that written waiver.
The written waiver is narrow and formal
Because the written-consent exception would swallow the protection if applied loosely, Florida polices the form of the waiver. To be valid, the consent generally must be a separate document attached to the underlying contract, written in the same language as that contract, and printed in at least fourteen-point type, in substantially the form the statute prescribes. There is a fourth checkable element that most summaries leave out: the prescribed form does not end with the consumer. Below the consumer’s signature and date it carries a second signature block for the creditor, under the sentence “I have fully explained this document to the consumer.” A waiver that collects the debtor’s signature and nothing else is not in substantially the statutory form. A boilerplate line buried in a long loan agreement, or a waiver that does not meet the formatting requirements, can be challenged as invalid. In practice this means that for the great majority of consumer debts – medical bills, credit cards reduced to judgment, ordinary money judgments between individuals – no qualifying waiver exists, and the head-of-family exemption stands. Creditors who count on reaching the over-threshold income usually find there was never an enforceable agreement reaching it.
Why $750 does not move when Florida’s minimum wage does
The $750 in Fla. Stat. 222.11 is a flat statutory dollar amount. It stood at $500 from 1993 until the Legislature raised it by chapter 2010-97, which the History note on the current edition of the section still records as the single amendment. Nothing indexes it. It moves when the Legislature moves it, and it has not moved in sixteen years – so a figure that looks stale on a page about wages is in fact current.
Florida’s minimum wage works the opposite way, and that contrast is the reason to state both. It lives in the constitution rather than the statute book: Article X, section 24 of the Florida Constitution steps it up by a dollar every September 30 and brings it to $15.00 an hour on September 30, 2026, adjusted annually for inflation after that. None of it reaches garnishment. The floor for a debtor who is not head of family comes from Fla. Stat. 222.11, which hands the calculation to the federal Consumer Credit Protection Act – and that formula keys to the federal minimum wage, not Florida’s. So the floor stays at thirty times $7.25, about $217.50 a week, while the state minimum wage roughly doubles around it. Some states write their rule as “whichever is greater” of the federal and state minimum and their floors rise automatically; Florida did not draft it that way. Applying both rules rather than quoting either: full-time work at $15.00 an hour grosses $600 a week, still under $750, so even after the September 2026 step-up a full-time minimum-wage head of family remains wholly exempt from ordinary wage garnishment.
Worked Examples: Who Gets Garnished
The same paycheck, four different outcomes, driven by status.
Head of family, below the threshold
Consider a debtor who supports two children and takes home $600 a week in disposable earnings. Because that figure is at or below $750 and the debtor is head of family, the entire paycheck is exempt. An ordinary creditor recovers nothing through wage garnishment, even with a perfectly valid judgment. This is the most common real-world result in Florida and the reason creditors so often pivot away from wages entirely.
Head of family, above the threshold, no written consent
Now raise that same parent’s disposable earnings to $900 a week, with no signed waiver. The first $750 is exempt automatically, and the excess – $150 – stays exempt as well, because there is no written agreement allowing it to be reached. The result is the same as the first example: zero is garnished. Without a qualifying waiver, the over-threshold income is protected, not available.
Head of family, above the threshold, with valid written consent
Take the nine-hundred-dollar earner again, but assume a lender obtained a properly formatted, fourteen-point, separately attached written waiver at the time of the loan. Now the first $750 remains exempt, while the excess above the threshold can be reached – subject to the federal cap discussed below. This is the only scenario in which a Florida head of family loses wage protection to an ordinary creditor, and it is comparatively rare because the formal waiver requirements are seldom satisfied in everyday consumer agreements.
Not head of family
Finally, a single debtor with no dependents does not get the head-of-family exemption at all. They fall under the federal formula: a creditor may garnish the lesser of twenty-five percent of disposable earnings or the amount by which disposable earnings exceed thirty times the federal minimum wage. With the federal minimum wage at $7 and twenty-five cents an hour, that protected floor works out to about $217 and fifty cents a week. So a non-head-of-family worker earning $800 in disposable pay would typically see roughly $200 garnished – the twenty-five-percent figure, since it is the lesser of the two limits.
Head of Family vs. Everyone Else
Florida protection compared to the bare federal rule.
| Situation | Governing Rule | What an Ordinary Creditor Can Reach | Key Condition |
|---|---|---|---|
| Head of family, at or below threshold | Fla. Stat. 222.11 | Nothing – wages fully exempt | Disposable earnings of $750 per week or less |
| Head of family, above threshold, no waiver | Fla. Stat. 222.11 | Nothing – the excess is still exempt | No valid written consent on file |
| Head of family, above threshold, valid waiver | 222.11 plus federal cap | The over-threshold portion, capped federally | Properly formatted written agreement |
| Not head of family | Federal (15 U.S.C. 1673) | Lesser of twenty-five percent or pay over thirty times minimum wage | No qualifying dependents |
| Child or spousal support | Federal support rules | Up to fifty to sixty-five percent of disposable pay | Support order, not an ordinary debt |
The pattern is unmistakable: for the great majority of working parents in Florida, an ordinary judgment creditor simply cannot use wage garnishment at all. That is why a Florida judgment so often comes down to assets the exemption does not cover – and why knowing exactly where the debtor banks and works decides the case. Where the wage route is closed, the next move is to confirm employment for a wage garnishment only when the debtor is the rare non-exempt earner, and otherwise to locate bank accounts and other reachable property.
When Wages Are Off Limits, Creditors Pivot
The exemption protects the paycheck – not everything the debtor owns.
The head-of-family exemption is powerful but specific: it protects earnings. It does not turn the debtor into a fortress. A creditor blocked at the payroll department will redirect the same writ-of-garnishment machinery toward property the statute does not shield, and that is where most Florida collection actually happens.
The first pivot is usually the bank account, and this is the point Florida is most often described backwards on. Deposited wages do not lose their character at the teller window. Fla. Stat. 222.11 keeps earnings that were exempt as wages exempt for six months after the financial institution receives them, so long as the funds can be traced and properly identified as earnings. The same subsection then answers the question every creditor asks next, and answers it against the creditor: commingling of earnings with other funds does not by itself defeat the ability of a head of family to trace earnings. Mixing a paycheck with a tax refund or a spouse’s deposit does not strip the exemption; it makes tracing harder, and tracing is the debtor’s burden. “Harder to prove” and “no longer exempt” are different things and the statute says which applies. What is genuinely exposed is money that was never earnings, earnings older than the six-month window, and earnings the debtor cannot document – which turns the bank pivot into an evidentiary question about which account the writ is served on. The second pivot is non-exempt personal property and real estate – though Florida’s constitutional homestead protection shields the debtor’s primary residence with no dollar cap, which is a separate and famous layer of Florida asset protection. A creditor who understands which assets are exempt and which are exposed wastes far less effort. The flip side – what a debtor can lawfully keep – is covered in our guide to Florida asset exemptions from creditors.
Timing matters too, because a judgment is not collectible forever in theory but is enforceable for a long time in practice. A Florida money judgment is generally enforceable for twenty years, with judgment liens requiring periodic renewal to keep their priority. That long runway is one reason patient, well-targeted asset location beats a rushed wage garnishment that the exemption was always going to defeat. How long a creditor has to sue in the first place is a different clock, addressed in our overview of the Florida debt-collection statute of limitations.
Why Florida Garnishments Fall Apart
The usual reasons a valid judgment still collects nothing.
Debtor Is Head of Family
The single most common dead end – the exemption shields the entire paycheck and the writ returns empty.
Wrong Employer on File
The writ goes to a past job; the debtor changed employers and the paperwork chases a paycheck that no longer exists.
Self-Employed or Paid in Cash
No conventional payroll to serve, so the wage route never opens and the search has to shift to accounts and assets.
Unknown Bank
An account garnishment needs the right institution and branch; guessing wrong tips off the debtor and freezes nothing.
Missed the Exemption Fight
The debtor files a claim of exemption and the creditor, unprepared, lets the writ dissolve by default.
Debtor Left the State
The job and the bank moved with them, raising domestication and out-of-state collection questions on top of the locate.
The Florida Writ-of-Garnishment Procedure
From judgment to a served garnishee, step by step.
Hold an Enforceable Florida Judgment
Garnishment is a post-judgment remedy. An out-of-state judgment must be domesticated first, and under Fla. Stat. 55.505 no execution or other enforcement process may issue until thirty days after the clerk mails notice of the recording.
Motion, Writ, and the First Bill
The creditor moves for a writ under Chapter 77, naming the garnishee – the employer or bank holding the debtor’s wages or money – and the clerk issues it. Fla. Stat. 77.28 then obliges the applying party to pay the garnishee $100 on demand.
Service Creates the Lien
Under Fla. Stat. 77.06 service of the writ makes the garnishee liable for what it owes the debtor at service and up to its answer, and creates a lien from the moment of service. The answer must name any other person appearing to have an interest.
Notice, Then the Sworn Claim
Fla. Stat. 77.041 requires the plaintiff to mail the writ and the Notice to Defendant to the debtor, who then has twenty days to file a notarized claim of exemption with the clerk and serve a copy on the plaintiff.
The back half of the calendar is where Florida writs die, and the statute prints the numbers that most summaries only gesture at. Section 77.041 gives the plaintiff five business days after the writ issues, or three business days after it is served on the garnishee, whichever is later, to mail the writ and notice to the debtor’s last known address. Once the debtor files a claim of exemption and request for hearing, the plaintiff must file a sworn written statement answering it within 8 business days if the claim was hand delivered, or 14 business days if it was served by mail. Miss that and there is no hearing and no argument: the statute directs that the clerk must automatically dissolve the writ and notify the parties by mail. The creditor is not asked, and a busy file is a dissolved writ.
The garnishee’s answer starts a second clock. Under Fla. Stat. 77.055 the plaintiff has five days after service of that answer – or after the time to answer expires – to serve a copy of it, with a notice that the recipient must move to dissolve the writ within twenty days of the date on the certificate of service. That service goes to the defendant’s last known address and to any other address disclosed by the garnishee’s answer, which is why a garnishee’s answer is worth reading as a records document and not just as a number. The lesson for creditors is that a Florida garnishment is won or lost on the calendar as much as on the merits, and the head-of-family claim is the defense that arrives most often.
One Writ, Two Fees, and a Guaranteed $100
What the instrument actually does, and what it costs to find out.
Florida’s wage writ is a continuing one, which changes the economics of the exercise. Under Fla. Stat. 77.0305, where wages are to be garnished to satisfy a judgment the court issues a continuing writ to the employer providing for periodic payment of a portion of the wages as they become due, until the judgment is satisfied or the court orders otherwise. The creditor does not re-serve the payroll department every pay period, so the cost is front-loaded into getting the first writ right – which is exactly why serving the wrong employer is expensive here.
The same section settles a question that stops many creditors before they file. A debtor’s status as an employee of the state, a state agency or a political subdivision does not preclude garnishment, and the state expressly waives sovereign immunity for the limited purpose of carrying the section out. A debtor working for a county school board or a sheriff’s office is reachable on the same terms as one working for a private employer, subject to the same head-of-family analysis.
Then the two fees. Section 77.0305 lets the employer keep up to $5 for the first deduction and up to $2 for each one after, taken from the debtor’s wages. The fee that lands on the creditor is Fla. Stat. 77.28: on issuance of any writ the applying party shall pay $100 to the garnishee on the garnishee’s demand at any time after service, toward the garnishee’s attorney fee – and on final judgment the court determines the garnishee’s costs and expenses, including a reasonable attorney fee, on top.
Read that against the exemption and the arithmetic is unforgiving. The $100 is payable regardless of outcome. A writ served on the employer of a head of family earning $700 a week returns nothing, dissolves on the debtor’s sworn claim, and still costs the creditor a hundred dollars plus filing and service. The statute has priced the guess, which is the argument for confirming status and employer before the motion is filed rather than after. Where the wage route is shut for good, the next questions are lien, levy and execution, covered in our Florida judgment collection guide.
Support and Tax: Different Rules Entirely
The head-of-family shield does not stop every kind of garnishment.
It would be a mistake to read section 222.11 as making a Florida paycheck untouchable. The exemption protects against ordinary creditors – the medical bill, the credit card, the personal judgment. It does not override the categories of debt that federal and state law treat as special.
Child and spousal support can reach a far larger share of disposable earnings than any commercial creditor. Under the federal framework that Florida follows for income withholding, the maximum is fifty percent of disposable earnings where the obligor is supporting another spouse or dependent child and sixty percent where they are not. The arrears uplift is commonly described as adding five points, and that is not what the statute says: those figures “shall be deemed to be” fifty-five and sixty-five percent “if and to the extent that” the withholding is for support due more than twelve weeks before the current pay period, so the higher ceilings reach only the portion attributable to that arrearage rather than the whole order. The head-of-family exemption simply does not apply to a support obligation.
What is easy to miss is that Florida support is not collected by a writ of garnishment at all. It uses a different instrument under a different chapter: the income deduction order in Fla. Stat. 61.1301, directed at the payor rather than issued by the clerk as a Chapter 77 writ, and its terms are Florida’s own. Where arrears are owed the order must state the arrearage and direct the payor to withhold an additional 20 percent or more of the periodic amount until it is paid; where a delinquency accrues the payor deducts a further 20 percent of the current support obligation until it clears. The same section directs the payor not to deduct more than the federal Consumer Credit Protection Act allows, so the federal ceiling is incorporated rather than displaced. An employer holding both a Chapter 77 writ and a Chapter 61 income deduction order for one worker is administering two instruments, and the support order consumes the room under the federal cap first. Likewise, unpaid federal taxes and certain other government debts – federal student loans, for instance – follow their own administrative collection rules and are not blocked by the Florida exemption. When people ask why their neighbor’s wages are being garnished in Florida “even with kids,” the answer is almost always that the debt is support, taxes, or another carve-out rather than an ordinary judgment.
This is also where the federal ceiling stays relevant for the non-exempt debtor. The federal Consumer Credit Protection Act caps ordinary garnishment at twenty-five percent of disposable earnings or the amount over thirty times the federal minimum wage, whichever is smaller, at 15 U.S.C. section 1673 — a test the federal regulation frames as three bands rather than as a simple lesser-of rule, its upper edge sitting at forty times the minimum wage, $290 a week, above which the twenty-five percent prong controls. Florida’s exemption is read on top of, not instead of, that federal floor. The state head-of-family rule itself lives in Florida Statute section 222.11, whose own text sends the non-head-of-family calculation to that federal section rather than restating it. That handoff is also where Florida stops being exceptional: how each state builds on the same federal floor – and which states raise it – is set out in our reference on wage garnishment laws by state.
How the Exemption Is Claimed and Proven
The protection is powerful, but it is asserted, not automatic.
One point trips up debtors and creditors alike: the head-of-family exemption does not enforce itself. A debtor who simply ignores a garnishment can lose protected wages by default, because the statute puts the burden on the person claiming the exemption to assert it on time. When the writ is served, the debtor receives a claim-of-exemption form, and it is the timely filing of that form – within the twenty-day window – that actually invokes the shield. Miss the deadline and even fully exempt earnings can be paid over to the creditor. For a creditor, this means a garnishment is never hopeless on paper; the question is whether the debtor will recognize and assert the defense in time.
When the claim is contested, the debtor is generally expected to come forward with proof of head-of-family status – documentation that they provide more than half the support of a child or dependent. Tax returns claiming the dependent, school or childcare records, household expense records, and an affidavit are the kinds of evidence courts look for. A creditor who suspects the status is overstated – for example, where two adults each claim to head the same household, or where the “dependent” is not actually supported – can challenge it, and the court resolves the dispute. This is why the seemingly simple word “family” generates so much real litigation in Florida garnishment practice.
Common misunderstandings
Three myths cause the most wasted effort. The first is that Florida bans wage garnishment outright; it does not – it strongly limits garnishment of a head of family’s wages, while non-exempt debtors and support and tax obligations remain fully reachable. The second is that the seven-hundred-fifty-dollar figure is a percentage cap like the federal rule; it is not – below the line the exemption is total, and above the line the excess is still exempt absent a written waiver. The third is that depositing a paycheck into a bank account automatically launders away the protection; it does not, because section 222.11 carries exempt earnings for six months after the bank receives them so long as they can be traced and identified, and the same subsection says in terms that commingling those earnings with other funds does not by itself defeat the head of family’s ability to trace them. A fourth, for anyone reading older commentary: section 222.12 is no longer in the Florida Statutes. Articles written about the 2010 amendments still describe its affidavit procedure, under which a creditor had two business days to deny a head-of-family affidavit under oath. That section is absent from the current chapter index and the state’s own URL for it no longer resolves to text, so treat any two-business-day affidavit rule as historical; the live procedure is section 77.041’s twenty-day sworn claim. Sorting myth from rule is exactly what separates a Florida garnishment that collects from one that quietly dissolves.
Why Collection Here Is a Locate Problem
The law is settled; the facts are what you have to find.
Step back from the statute and the practical shape of Florida judgment collection comes into focus. Because the head-of-family exemption blocks the wage route for so many debtors, the cases that actually pay out are the ones where the creditor knows the facts on the ground: the rare non-exempt employer to garnish, the bank account that can be reached, the rental property or business interest that the exemption never covered. None of that is a legal question. It is an information question, and information is exactly what stale court files do not contain.
Florida does not merely leave room for that work – it writes it into the creditor’s own procedure. The mailing duty in Fla. Stat. 77.041 has a fallback attached: the writ and Notice to Defendant go to the debtor’s last known address, but if the post office returns them undeliverable or if the last known address is not discoverable after diligent search, the plaintiff must mail them to the defendant at the defendant’s place of employment. The statute assumes the creditor knows where the debtor works or can find out, and it names “diligent search” as the standard for having tried. Section 77.055 points the same way, requiring service on any other address disclosed by the garnishee’s answer.
This is the work we do. As a public-records research firm, we locate a debtor’s current employer, identify likely depository institutions, surface real property and registered assets, and confirm a current address for service of the writ and notice – all from public records and licensed databases, used for the lawful purpose of enforcing a valid judgment. Nobody on this team holds a Florida private investigator’s license and no investigative licensure is claimed anywhere on this site; we are records researchers, not lawyers, and we do not file your writ. We never pretext: nobody here calls a payroll department posing as a bank, a courier or a co-worker, and no false identity is used to obtain a record. We also decline any request that reads as locating a person who is avoiding an abuser rather than a creditor, including anyone protected by a domestic violence injunction, and we say so before the file opens rather than after. What we hand your attorney or your collections team is the verified facts that decide where a garnishment is worth serving and where it would only tip off the debtor. The same methodology underpins our broader skip tracing services, and when employment is the specific question, our guide on how to find someone’s current employer walks through the approach. For a legitimate judgment-enforcement matter, a verified locate typically comes back within 24 hours.
Who Uses This Research
We do the locate; you enforce the judgment.
Florida Collection Counsel
Employers and assets located for enforcement
Holders of a Florida Judgment
Reachable property identified before the writ
Purchasers of Charged-Off Paper
Current employment and banks verified
Small-Claims Winners
Self-represented and trying to actually collect
Landlords With a Damage Judgment
Former tenants traced for damage judgments
Servers of the Writ
Verified addresses so the writ is served right
Whoever you are, the wall in Florida is the same: a valid judgment is worthless if the wage route is blocked and you cannot find the assets that are not. We locate the current employer, the likely bank, the real property, and a serviceable address through lawful public-records research, and we document what we find so your filing rests on verified facts rather than a guess. That work is the same whether the judgment sits in Miami-Dade, Duval or Escambia, and it is described in full on our page for Florida skip tracing services. We are not a consumer reporting agency and our reports are not consumer reports under the Fair Credit Reporting Act; they may not be used for tenant screening, employment, credit or insurance decisions. We do not give legal advice or file your writ – we make sure the facts behind it are real.
Our Commitment
We find what makes a Florida judgment collectible – a current employer where the exemption does not apply, the likely bank, the non-exempt assets, and a serviceable address – or a documented record when the trail runs cold. Lawful, court-ready public-records research for creditors, collection attorneys, and judgment holders since 2004.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can wages be garnished in Florida at all?
Yes, but Florida is one of the most protective states. An ordinary judgment creditor can garnish a debtor who is not head of family under the federal formula. A debtor who is head of family with disposable earnings of $750 a week or less is fully exempt, and earnings above that figure are exempt too unless the debtor agreed in writing.
Is “head of household” the same as “head of family” in Florida?
Yes. Fla. Stat. 222.11 uses “head of family” and that is the phrase a Florida court order will use, but searchers, employers and most practitioners say “head of household” for the same status. It means any natural person providing more than one-half of the support for a child or other dependent – a support test, not a marital-status test. Because the test is arithmetic, two people cannot both meet it for the same dependent.
What is the seven-hundred-fifty-dollar weekly threshold?
It is the line in section 222.11. A head of family whose disposable earnings are $750 a week or less has all of those earnings exempt from garnishment by an ordinary creditor. Earnings above that weekly figure remain exempt as well unless the debtor signed a valid written agreement allowing the garnishment.
Can a debtor waive the head-of-family exemption?
Only through a narrow, formal written agreement. To be valid the consent generally must be a separate document attached to the underlying contract, in the same language, and printed in at least fourteen-point type in substantially the statutory form. Most ordinary consumer debts have no qualifying waiver, so the exemption usually stands.
How much can be garnished if the debtor is not head of family?
The federal cap applies: the lesser of twenty-five percent of disposable earnings or the amount by which disposable earnings exceed thirty times the federal minimum wage. With the minimum wage at $7 and twenty-five cents an hour, that protected floor is about $217 and fifty cents a week.
How long does a debtor have to claim an exemption?
Twenty days, and the form must be notarized. Under Fla. Stat. 77.041 the debtor files the sworn claim with the clerk within twenty days of receiving the notice and serves a copy on the plaintiff. The plaintiff must then answer it by sworn written statement within 8 business days if the claim was hand delivered or 14 business days if it was mailed; if that deadline passes there is no hearing and the clerk must automatically dissolve the writ.
Does the exemption stop child support or tax garnishment?
No. The head-of-family exemption protects against ordinary creditors only. Child and spousal support can reach roughly half to sixty-five percent of disposable earnings under federal rules, and unpaid federal taxes and federal student loans follow their own administrative collection rules that the Florida exemption does not block.
What does a Florida writ of garnishment cost the creditor?
More than the filing fee, and it is owed whether or not the writ collects. Under Fla. Stat. 77.28 the party applying for the writ must pay $100 to the garnishee on the garnishee’s demand at any time after service, toward the garnishee’s attorney fee, and on final judgment the court also determines the garnishee’s costs and expenses. Separately, Fla. Stat. 77.0305 lets the employer keep up to $5 for the first deduction and up to $2 for each one after.
Holding a Florida Judgment You Can’t Collect?
We locate the current employer, the likely bank, and the non-exempt assets that decide whether a Florida garnishment is worth serving – lawful public-records research with a verified locate typically within 24 hours. Contact us to get started.
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