Wage Garnishment: The Process, the Federal Limits, and What's Protected

Garnishment is the moment debt collection stops being phone calls and becomes math: a slice of a paycheck, redirected by legal order before it reaches you. It's also one of the most rule-bound corners of consumer law — federal caps on how much can go, a strict order of operations for how it starts, and a formal way to object that most people never learn exists. The dread outruns the reality, and the reality has numbers.

Here's the machine: how a garnishment gets attached, what the federal limits protect, which debts play by special rules, and what the contest process looks like.

First, the vocabulary

Garnishment is a court or agency order requiring someone who owes you money — almost always your employer, sometimes your bank — to pay part of it to a creditor instead. The employer in this story is the garnishee: a bystander with paperwork duties, not a party against you. And the key input to every calculation is disposable earnings — your pay after legally required deductions like taxes and Social Security. Not after rent, not after the car payment: after taxes, essentially. Every limit below runs on that number.

How an ordinary creditor reaches a paycheck

For consumer debts — cards, medical bills, personal loans — garnishment is the end of a long, visible process, never the start.

1. The lawsuit and the judgmentMonths before · the mandatory first step A private creditor cannot touch wages without first suing you and winning a judgment — a court's official finding that you owe the money. The suit arrives as a summons with its own deadlines and its own defenses (and its own federal rulebook while collectors are pursuing you). A garnishment that seems to come from nowhere usually traces back to a lawsuit that was ignored or served badly.
2. The writ issuesWeeks 0–4 after judgment · modest court fees, added to the debt With a judgment, the creditor asks the court for a writ of garnishment (in some states an "earnings withholding order" or "income execution") directed at your employer.
3. The employer is served — and you get noticeDays to weeks · withholding starts within a pay cycle or two The employer must respond, calculate the withholding under the caps below, and — in every state — you're entitled to notice of the garnishment and of your right to claim exemptions. That notice, with its short deadline, is the most important piece of paper in the process.
4. The exemption claim, if you make oneUsually 10–30 days · free or nearly so A claim of exemption is a short form telling the court the money is legally protected — because the math exceeds the caps, because your income is exempt by type (Social Security, disability, unemployment benefits are protected from ordinary creditors), or because state hardship rules apply. California's courts publish the whole procedure, forms included, on their self-help site. A hearing follows; the garnishment can be reduced or ended.
5. Withholding runs until the judgment is paidMonths to years · interest accrues, payments credit against the debt The employer remits each pay period. When the judgment (plus allowed interest and costs) is satisfied, the writ dies. One more federal protection travels the whole way: your employer cannot fire you over a garnishment for any single debt.

The federal caps, drawn to scale

The Consumer Credit Protection Act's Title III — enforced by the Department of Labor — caps ordinary garnishment at the lesser of 25% of disposable earnings, or the amount by which they exceed 30 times the federal minimum wage. At the current $7.25 minimum, that second figure is $217.50 a week: disposable earnings at or under it can't be garnished at all by ordinary creditors, and earnings just above it lose only the excess.

The special-rules column is where surprises live. Child support garnishments run far higher — 50% of disposable earnings if you support another spouse or child, 60% if not, plus 5% when more than 12 weeks behind — and usually attach automatically through income withholding, no separate lawsuit needed. Defaulted federal student loans use administrative wage garnishment: the Education Department can take up to 15% of disposable pay without any court judgment, after a 30-day notice that carries hearing and repayment-arrangement rights (the official rundown lives at studentaid.gov). And IRS levies skip the percentage game for exemption tables. The common thread: each of these arrives with its own notice and its own escape hatches, all of which are time-limited.

What the states add on top

Federal law is a floor, and states build in every direction above it:

Bank accounts: the parallel track

Wages have the strongest protections in this story, and it matters exactly where wages stop being wages. Once a paycheck lands in a checking account, an ordinary judgment creditor in most states can pursue a bank levy — a one-time freeze-and-take aimed at the account rather than the employer — under different, often weaker rules than wage garnishment. Two protections follow the money anyway. Federal benefits like Social Security keep their exempt status after deposit, and a federal banking rule requires banks to automatically shield two months' worth of directly deposited federal benefits from most levies, no forms needed. And state exemption laws typically let you claim protection for exempt funds that got commingled — through the same claim-of-exemption machinery described above, on the same short clock. The practical upshot: a garnishment notice about your wages and a freeze on your account are two different legal events, each with its own paperwork, and responding to one doesn't answer the other.

The quiet levers people miss

Three of them, each free. The exemption claim deadline on the garnishment notice is short — often ten to thirty days — and filing it is how protected income (Social Security, disability, veterans benefits, unemployment) gets recognized when the creditor's math ignored it. The employer's calculation is checkable: disposable earnings, the floor, the cap — a plain-arithmetic review of the pay stub against the rest of your paycheck rights catches real errors. And the underlying judgment is sometimes attackable — a suit served at an old address can support a motion to vacate, which unwinds the garnishment with it. Multiple garnishments, hardship rules, or a judgment you never knew existed are the scenarios where free legal aid or a consult stops being optional-seeming; garnishment defense is bread-and-butter work for legal aid offices precisely because the deadlines are short and the forms are learnable.

The shape to remember: for ordinary debts, garnishment is loud — lawsuit, judgment, writ, notice — and capped hard. The quiet, fast versions belong to child support, student loans, and taxes, each with its own notice and its own clock. In every version, the protected amounts protect themselves only when someone files the form that says so.