Wage garnishment calculator

For an ordinary debt (credit card, medical bill, personal loan), federal law (CCPA Title III, 15 U.S.C. §1673) caps garnishment at the LESSER of 25% of your disposable earnings, or the amount by which disposable earnings exceed 30 times the federal minimum wage ($217.50/week, scaled for other pay frequencies). Below that floor, no ordinary garnishment is permitted at all.

Gross pay minus deductions REQUIRED BY LAW only -- federal, state, and local taxes, Social Security, Medicare, and legally mandated retirement contributions. A voluntary deduction -- 401(k), health insurance premium, HSA/FSA, union dues -- does NOT reduce disposable earnings, even though it reduces your take-home pay. This is a common point of confusion: contributing more to a 401(k) lowers your paycheck but not your garnishment exposure.

Yes, significantly -- up to 50% of disposable earnings if you're supporting another spouse or child, up to 60% if not, with an additional 5 percentage points (55%/65%) if payments are more than 12 weeks in arrears. Unlike ordinary garnishment, support orders have no protected-floor exemption -- the percentage applies even to earnings that would otherwise be fully protected.

Yes -- and if it does, the LOWER (more protective) limit governs. States can set stricter garnishment protections than the federal CCPA floor, but cannot permit MORE garnishment than federal law allows. This calculator applies both, showing whichever binds: 50 of the 51 jurisdictions have been read from their own statutes -- every one except Arkansas, whose code is not published in a free primary source. Three of them (Texas, Pennsylvania and South Carolina) bar ordinary consumer-debt garnishment almost entirely; North Carolina's protection turns on a finding this calculator cannot make; and three more (Florida, Missouri and Nebraska) apply a different, more protective rule to a debtor who is the head of a family. Pick Arkansas and the federal limit alone is shown, which may overstate what a creditor can actually reach.

No. Federal agency non-tax debt (like a defaulted federal student loan) can be garnished administratively up to 15% under a separate statute (the Debt Collection Improvement Act), and bankruptcy court orders and federal/state tax debt follow their own rules entirely -- none of these use the CCPA percentages this calculator estimates.