How Wage Garnishment Works: Limits, Exemptions, and Employer Duties

Wage garnishment is a legal process that lets a creditor collect a debt by taking money directly from your paycheck before it reaches you. For most consumer debts, the creditor must first sue you and win a court judgment; the court then issues an order that forces your employer to withhold part of each paycheck and send it to the creditor.¹ Federal law caps most garnishments at 25 percent of your disposable earnings, but child support, federal taxes, and student loans run on their own rules with higher limits or different procedures.

How the Garnishment Starts

For credit cards, medical bills, personal loans, and similar private debts, a creditor generally cannot touch your wages until it has taken you to court and won. Once a money judgment is entered, the creditor can go back to the court and ask for a garnishment order directed at your employer.¹ That order is what compels your employer to start withholding.

Some federal agencies can skip the lawsuit entirely. The Department of Education has statutory authority to garnish up to 15 percent of disposable pay for defaulted federal student loans through a process called administrative wage garnishment.² The Department announced in January 2026 that it is temporarily delaying involuntary collections on federal student loans, including administrative wage garnishment, while it implements new repayment reforms.³ The IRS can also reach wages for unpaid federal taxes through a notice of levy, which follows its own framework.⁴

Child support and alimony run on a third track. Those withholding orders are typically issued through family court when the support obligation is established, and they carry higher limits than ordinary consumer debts.

Notice and Your Right to Object

Before money starts coming out, you are entitled to advance notice. For court-ordered garnishments, you should receive documents explaining what the debt is, how much is owed, and how to claim any exemptions that protect your income. Deadlines vary by state, so check your state’s rules the moment the paperwork arrives.

For federal administrative wage garnishment, the rules are specific. The agency has to send written notice before the garnishment begins, and you have 15 business days from the mailing date to request a hearing. If your request lands inside that window, the agency cannot issue the garnishment order until the hearing is held and a written decision is issued. You can challenge whether the debt exists, dispute the amount, or argue that the proposed withholding rate would cause financial hardship for you and your dependents.⁵

Miss that 15-day deadline and you can still request a hearing, but the agency does not have to hold up the garnishment while it works through your request. Whatever type of garnishment you are facing, act fast. The windows are short, and stopping or shrinking a garnishment after withholding has begun is harder than heading it off.

How Much Can Be Taken

The Consumer Credit Protection Act sets the ceiling for ordinary consumer garnishments. Each week, a creditor can take no more than the lesser of:⁶

25 percent of your disposable earnings for that week, or
The amount by which your disposable earnings exceed 30 times the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.⁷

Thirty times $7.25 is $217.50 a week. If your weekly disposable earnings are $217.50 or less, nothing can be garnished. Between $217.50 and $290, a creditor can take only the amount above $217.50, because that figure is smaller than 25 percent of your pay. Above $290, the flat 25 percent cap applies.⁶

In practice: at $220 in weekly disposable income, the maximum garnishment is $2.50 ($220 minus $217.50). At $1,000 in weekly disposable income, the maximum is $250.

What Counts as Disposable Earnings

Disposable earnings are what is left after your employer takes out amounts required by law: federal and state income tax, Social Security, Medicare, and state unemployment insurance.⁸ Voluntary deductions such as health insurance premiums, 401(k) contributions, and union dues do not reduce disposable earnings for garnishment purposes. You cannot shrink a garnishment by increasing your voluntary payroll deductions.

“Earnings” is defined broadly and covers wages, salaries, commissions, bonuses, and retirement payments.⁸ Severance, sign-on bonuses, productivity bonuses, and back pay from settlements are all included. For tipped workers, earnings include the cash wage paid by the employer plus any tip credit the employer claims; tips beyond the tip credit are not counted as earnings for garnishment math.⁹

Higher Limits for Child Support and Alimony

Domestic support obligations reach much deeper into your paycheck than consumer debts. If you are currently supporting another spouse or child not covered by the order, up to 50 percent of your disposable earnings can be withheld. If you are not supporting another family, that ceiling rises to 60 percent.¹⁰

If your support payments are more than 12 weeks behind, each of those limits jumps by 5 percentage points, to 55 or 65 percent.¹⁰ Child support withholding also outranks almost every other garnishment. Only a federal tax lien entered before the child support order was established has higher priority.¹¹

How IRS Tax Levies Are Different

An IRS levy for unpaid federal taxes runs on its own rules, not the CCPA percentage cap. Instead of taking 25 percent, the IRS leaves you a small exempt amount based on your filing status and number of dependents, and takes the rest. Those exempt amounts are published each year in Publication 1494.¹²

Before the levy, the IRS must send you a notice (CP504) warning that it intends to levy your wages, bank accounts, and other property.⁴ Once the levy reaches your employer, the employer uses information you provide on Form 668-W to calculate the exempt amount and sends everything else to the IRS. By IRS policy, the levy generally attaches to your usual take-home pay minus the exempt amount, though unreasonably large voluntary deductions can be disallowed.¹³ An IRS wage levy can therefore take far more of your paycheck than a consumer garnishment, so if you owe back taxes, contact the IRS about a payment plan or other collection alternative before a levy is served.

Income That Is Protected

Certain federal benefits are shielded from garnishment by private creditors. Social Security, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Veterans Affairs benefits are all protected from consumer debt collection. SSI gets the strongest protection of all: it cannot be garnished even for government debts or child support.¹⁴

Those protections have limits. Regular Social Security can be garnished for child support, alimony, and certain government debts, and the IRS can levy up to 15 percent of each Social Security payment for overdue federal taxes.¹⁵ If benefits are directly deposited to your bank account, federal rules require the bank to automatically protect two months of benefit deposits from any garnishment order.¹⁶ If you deposit paper checks manually instead, that automatic protection does not apply, and you would have to go to court and prove the money is from a protected source.¹⁴

One boundary worth naming: the CCPA’s 25 percent cap and minimum-wage floor apply to employer-employee relationships. If you are self-employed, a freelancer, or an independent contractor, those percentage protections do not cover you. A creditor with a judgment can pursue bank account levies or garnish specific payments owed to you, sometimes for the full amount.

What Your Employer Has to Do

Once a garnishment order arrives, your employer has to confirm your identity, calculate the correct withholding from your current pay, and forward the money to the creditor or court as directed. For federal administrative wage garnishment orders, the employer must begin deductions on the first payday after receiving the order.¹⁷ Timelines for court-ordered garnishments depend on state law.

Your employer cannot fire you because your wages are being garnished for a single debt. Federal law prohibits termination based on garnishment for any one indebtedness, no matter how long it lasts or how large the amount. An employer that violates this rule faces a fine of up to $1,000, up to a year in prison, or both.¹⁸ That protection does not extend to workers being garnished by two or more separate creditors.

If more than one garnishment order lands, child support takes first priority over consumer debts.¹¹ When withholding for a higher-priority garnishment already meets or exceeds 25 percent of disposable earnings, no additional amount can be taken for a lower-priority consumer debt.⁹ The second creditor waits until the first is satisfied or total withholding drops below the cap.

States That Give You More

Federal law is the floor, and states can go further. A handful of states, including Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and South Carolina, prohibit wage garnishment for most consumer debts entirely. In those states, a creditor with a judgment on a credit card or medical bill generally cannot touch your paycheck, though other collection tools such as bank account levies may still be available to it.

Many other states offer protections beyond the federal minimum: lower percentage caps, higher income floors, or head-of-household exemptions that shield a larger portion of your pay if you are the primary earner supporting dependents. These rules vary widely, so your state’s specific garnishment law can change how much of your paycheck is protected.

How a Garnishment Ends

The most direct way a garnishment stops is when the debt is paid in full, including the judgment amount, allowed interest, and any legal fees the court authorized. Interest on unpaid judgments is set by state law and varies. Once the balance reaches zero, the creditor must file a release to end the withholding.

Garnishment also ends when the order expires under applicable court rules and the creditor does not renew it. A court can vacate or stay a garnishment if you successfully challenge the underlying judgment. Filing for bankruptcy triggers an automatic stay that immediately halts most collection actions, including wage garnishment, without a separate court order.

If you leave the job or are laid off, the employer notifies the court or creditor that you are no longer on the payroll and withholding stops. The creditor can then find your new employer and serve a fresh order. The cycle continues until the debt is paid, discharged in bankruptcy, or otherwise resolved.

1
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Can a Debt Collector Take or Garnish My Wages or Benefits?
2
eCFR. 45 CFR Part 32 – Administrative Wage Garnishment
3
U.S. Department of Education. U.S. Department of Education Delays Involuntary Collections Amid Ongoing Student Loan Repayment Improvements
4
Internal Revenue Service. Understanding Your CP504 Notice
5
eCFR. 31 CFR 285.11 – Administrative Wage Garnishment
6
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1673 – Restriction on Garnishment
7
U.S. Department of Labor. State Minimum Wage Laws
8
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1672 – Definitions
9
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet #30 – Wage Garnishment Protections of the Consumer Credit Protection Act
10
Administration for Children & Families. Is There a Limit to the Amount of Money That Can Be Taken From My Paycheck for Child Support?
11
Administration for Children & Families. Income Withholding – Answers to Employers’ Questions
12
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 1494
13
Internal Revenue Service. 5.11.5 Levy on Wages, Salary, and Other Income
14
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Can a Debt Collector Take My Federal Benefits, Like Social Security or VA Payments?
15
Social Security Administration. Can My Social Security Benefits Be Garnished or Levied?
16
eCFR. Part 212 – Garnishment of Accounts Containing Federal Benefit Payments
17
Bureau of the Fiscal Service. Cross-Servicing – For Employers
18
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1674 – Restriction on Discharge From Employment by Reason of Garnishment