New York Wage Garnishment Laws

This is where New York departs sharply from the federal standard. Under CPLR 5231, the deduction from a debtor’s pay for a consumer or commercial judgment is capped at the lesser of two figures: ten percent of the debtor’s gross income, or twenty-five percent of disposable earnings. Because those two ceilings are compared and the smaller one governs, for most wage earners the binding cap is the ten-percent-of-gross figure, not the federal 25%.

Gross income, for this purpose, means salary, wages, and other income including overtime, commissions, and trust income, before deductions. Disposable earnings are what remains after legally required deductions such as federal, state, and local taxes, Social Security, and the employee share of state unemployment insurance, but not voluntary deductions like health premiums or retirement contributions.

On top of those two ceilings sits a floor borrowed from federal law and from New York’s own minimum-wage rules. The 25%-of-disposable figure applies only to the portion of disposable earnings that exceeds thirty times the minimum wage per week. New York uses the greater of the federal or the applicable state or local minimum wage, and because New York’s minimum wage is well above the federal rate of seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour, the New York number controls. At the New York City minimum wage of seventeen dollars an hour, that protected weekly floor works out to five hundred ten dollars; if a debtor’s weekly disposable earnings fall below thirty times the applicable minimum wage, nothing can be deducted at all under the income execution.

A worked example makes the comparison concrete. Take a New York City worker grossing one thousand dollars a week, with disposable earnings of about seven hundred eighty dollars after required deductions. Test one, ten percent of gross, is one hundred dollars. Test two, twenty-five percent of disposable, is about one hundred ninety-five dollars, and that figure is itself reduced because only the disposable pay above thirty times the minimum wage counts. The creditor takes the lesser of the two, so the income execution yields one hundred dollars a week, not the roughly two hundred fifty dollars a federal-style reading would suggest. Now drop that same worker to a part-time check with disposable earnings of four hundred fifty dollars a week, below the five-hundred-ten-dollar NYC floor, and the deduction falls to zero, even though ten percent of gross would otherwise be something.

The practical effect: a low-wage New York worker is often fully protected, and a typical worker has only ten percent of gross reachable. A creditor who budgets for a federal-style 25% bite will be disappointed, and a creditor chasing a debtor whose paycheck is unknown collects nothing regardless of the math.

The One Exception: Support Orders

The ten-percent-of-gross cap is the consumer-and-commercial-judgment rule. An income execution issued to enforce a child or spousal support obligation the debtor owes is not held to that cap. Support executions follow the higher federal Consumer Credit Protection Act percentages, which allow withholding of up to fifty percent of disposable earnings when the debtor supports another spouse or child, and up to sixty percent when the debtor does not, with an additional five percent in each case for support more than twelve weeks in arrears. That is the one ordinary situation in which substantially more than ten percent of a New York worker’s check leaves by income execution, and it is why support enforcement and consumer-judgment enforcement are not interchangeable.

The order of service is the heart of a New York income execution. The sheriff or marshal first serves the execution on the judgment debtor, who then has the option to begin paying the required installments directly. The statute gives the debtor a window of twenty days. If the debtor pays as required, the employer is never involved.

If the debtor fails to make payments for that twenty-day period, or if the enforcement officer cannot serve the debtor within twenty days after the execution is delivered, the officer then levies on the income source by serving a copy of the execution on the employer. From that point the employer is legally obligated to withhold the capped amount from each paycheck and remit it to the officer, who passes it to the creditor. An employer in New York who is properly served and ignores the execution exposes itself to liability for the amounts it should have withheld.

When more than one income execution targets the same debtor and the same paycheck, New York pays them in the order the enforcement officer received them, a first-in-time priority. A creditor who locates the employer and files early can be collecting while a later creditor waits for the first debt to be satisfied. The aggregate deduction still cannot break the ten-percent and twenty-five-percent ceilings, so a second consumer execution generally collects little or nothing until the first is satisfied. Speed and accurate employer information are not just conveniences here; they directly affect whether and when you get paid.

Sheriff or NYC Marshal

Who carries out the execution depends on where the debtor is. Across most of the state the enforcement officer is the county sheriff; inside the five boroughs of New York City the work is typically done by a New York City marshal, a separate office that handles civil enforcement for the city. The distinction matters operationally: an execution must be delivered to an officer with jurisdiction over the place the levy will land, and the officer’s fee, often around five percent of what is collected, comes out of the recovery. Delivering the execution to the wrong office, or to an officer who has no reach over the debtor’s actual workplace, is one of the quiet reasons a valid judgment produces nothing.

What the Employer Must Do

Once an employer in New York is properly served with the income execution, the obligation is mandatory, not optional. The employer must begin withholding the capped amount from each pay period and remit it to the sheriff or marshal, who forwards it to the creditor, and must continue until the judgment is satisfied or the execution is lifted. An employer that ignores a valid execution does not simply delay the creditor; it can be held personally liable for the amounts it failed to withhold, effectively stepping into the debtor’s shoes for those installments. New York also forbids an employer from firing an employee because a single judgment results in an income execution, mirroring the federal anti-discharge protection. For the creditor, that mandatory-withholding-with-liability structure is exactly why naming the correct, current employer is so valuable: a verified employer is one that the law compels to pay.

What the Debtor Can Do Back

The debtor is not without recourse, and a creditor who over-reaches can lose ground. Under CPLR 5231(i) and the catch-all relief provision CPLR 5240, a judgment debtor may ask the court to modify, suspend, or limit an income execution that imposes undue hardship, and a court can reduce the deduction or pause it entirely. A debtor can also assert that the targeted income is exempt under CPLR 5205. The takeaway for creditors is practical: an execution built on accurate figures and a properly identified employer is durable, while one that grabs at exempt income or pushes past the statutory caps invites a motion that can shrink or vacate the very levy you filed.

Wages are only one target. A New York judgment creditor can also reach money sitting in a debtor’s bank account, but the tool and the limits are different from the income execution. The creditor serves a restraining notice under CPLR 5222, or directs the sheriff or marshal to levy under CPLR 5232, and the bank freezes the account up to the amount of the judgment plus interest and fees.

What stops a New York bank levy from sweeping an account clean is the Exempt Income Protection Act, codified at CPLR 5222-a. The EIPA automatically shields a baseline of funds in any account from restraint, equal to two hundred forty times the greater of the federal or New York minimum wage. Because New York’s minimum wage is the controlling figure, that automatic floor is substantial: at 2026 rates it works out to roughly four thousand eighty dollars in the downstate region of New York City, Long Island, and Westchester, and about three thousand eight hundred forty dollars elsewhere in the state. On top of that baseline, the first twenty-five hundred dollars of directly deposited exempt funds, such as Social Security or other protected benefits, is shielded as well.

The EIPA also imposes a paperwork sequence the creditor must respect. Along with the restraining notice, the creditor has to serve a statutory exemption notice and exemption-claim forms; the debtor then has a window to claim exemptions, and the creditor has a short period to object before the bank must release the protected funds. The net effect for a creditor is blunt: levying a modest balance often nets nothing once the EIPA floor is applied, and pursuing a bank levy without first knowing whether the account holds non-exempt money above the floor can cost more in fees than it ever recovers. As with wages, the move that pays is intelligence first, paperwork second.