Garnishment: What Employers Must Do
A garnishment order is a command to you, not to your employee. Ignore it and you can be liable for their entire debt. What to do when one arrives.
Garnishment
The order is addressed to you, the deadline that matters is not the one you think, and mishandling it can transfer somebody else's debt onto your balance sheet
An envelope arrives with a court seal on it. Inside is a document about one of your employees, a debt you knew nothing about, and a set of instructions. This guide covers what those instructions demand of you, what the deadline really is, and what to do in the first week.
The instinct is to feel sorry for the person, or awkward about it. All understandable, and all beside the point: the document is not a notification about your employee. It is an order addressed to you. And almost nobody tells small employers this: if you mishandle it, many state garnishment statutes let a court make you liable for your employee's entire outstanding debt. Not the amount you should have withheld. The whole thing.
This is general information rather than legal advice. Garnishment procedure is state law, and it varies enough from state to state that a lawyer is a reasonable expense here. I build FirstHR, which does not run your payroll and does not withhold anything.
Your payroll system does the withholding. What it does not do is hold the order, track the deadline, and still have the file in three years when somebody asks.
What Garnishment Is
Garnishment is the legal procedure by which a creditor reaches money that belongs to a debtor but is being held by somebody else. When the money is wages, the somebody else is you.
The vocabulary around this is a mess and it is worth flattening. Wage garnishment, garnishing wages, garnished wages, paycheck garnishment, and payroll garnishment are all the same thing described from slightly different angles.
A garnishment order, a writ of garnishment, an earnings withholding order, an income withholding order, and a notice of levy are all documents that do the same job: compel you to withhold. The differences between them are procedural rather than conceptual, and none of them change what is being asked of you.
What does change is the deadline, the cap, and who you send the money to. Those vary by type of debt and by state, and getting them wrong is what this article is about.
Wage Assignment vs Garnishment
A wage assignment is the employee's own written authorization to send part of their pay to a creditor. Nothing compels it and no court issued it, which is the entire difference. A garnishment is imposed on you. An assignment is agreed to by them, and you are simply honoring it.
That distinction decides what happens when the employee changes their mind. The Federal Trade Commission Credit Practices Rule at 16 CFR 444.2 bars lenders and retail installment sellers from taking a wage assignment in consumer credit at all, unless it takes one of three narrow forms: an assignment revocable at the debtor's will, a payroll deduction plan commencing at the time of the transaction, or one covering only wages already earned.
So a consumer wage assignment is usually revocable, and when the employee revokes it you stop deducting. Do not let the label settle the question, though. If a document compels you rather than asks you, it is a garnishment whatever it is titled, and the answer deadline applies to it.
You Are the Garnishee
This is the reframing that makes everything else make sense, and small employers almost universally miss it on the first order they receive.
You did nothing wrong. You owe nobody anything. You are simply holding money that belongs to somebody who does owe something, and the law gives a court the power to reach through you to get it. That role has a name, and the name comes with duties of your own. Those duties are enforceable against you regardless of what your employee does, says, or wants.
According to the Cornell Legal Information Institute, garnishment is a court-ordered process for collecting on a judgment that takes money directly from a third party who owes the defendant a debt, and that third party is called the garnishee. You are the third party. The proceeding is happening around you and to you, and you are now a participant in it whether you wanted to be or not.
Which produces the single most important practical consequence in this entire article. The employee's debt is theirs. Your compliance obligations are yours. Those are two separate things, and only one of them can end up on your balance sheet.
Writ of Garnishment, Garnishee Order, and Memorandum of Garnishee
A writ of garnishment is the court document that puts you into the garnishee role, and a garnishee order is the same instrument described from the receiving end. One is what the court issues once the creditor has sued and won. The other is what it becomes after it has been served on you.
Neither name changes what is attached to it. Both carry the same two duties: file an answer with the issuing court by the deadline that state law sets, and withhold from the next pay period within the cap that applies to that type of debt.
The answer you file is the third document in that family, and it is the one you write rather than the one you receive. States name it differently: answer of garnishee, garnishee disclosure, garnishee response. A writ arrives, an answer goes back, and the gap between those two events is where the liability in this article lives.
One caution on vocabulary, because the names overlap. California's Memorandum of Garnishee, form EJ-152, is what a garnishee files about personal property or money of the judgment debtor. It is not the wage form: an employee's wages are reached through a separate Earnings Withholding Order instead.
The Liability Nobody Warns You About
Now the part that should genuinely change how you handle this.
Sit with the shape of that risk for a moment, because it is unusual.
In most compliance failures, the penalty scales with the failure. You withheld too little, so you owe the difference. You filed late, so you pay a percentage. Bad, bounded, survivable.
Here the penalty does not scale with anything. The amount you were supposed to withhold might be two hundred dollars a month. The amount you can end up owing is every dollar of a judgment you had nothing to do with, plus costs, plus the creditor's attorney fees.
A creditor who suspects the employee is uncollectible has an obvious incentive to look very hard at whether the employer made a paperwork error, because you are a far better target than the person who actually owes the money.
Some statutes build in no warning at all. Under Florida Statutes 77.081, a garnishee that fails to answer as required is defaulted, and final judgment follows against it for the plaintiff's claim with interest and costs.
For an employer in that position, the sequence can be this: an order arrives, you set it aside meaning to deal with it, and the next document you receive is a judgment against your company for somebody else's debt.
Who Can Garnish Wages
Five kinds of party can garnish wages: a creditor that has sued and won, a child support agency or court, the IRS or a state tax agency, the Department of Education for a defaulted student loan, and other federal agencies collecting a debt.
The difference between them is not academic. It determines the cap, the deadline, where the money goes, and whether anybody had to go to court at all.
The line worth staring at is whether a court was involved. An employer's mental model of garnishment usually involves a judge, a lawsuit, and a judgment. That model is correct for a creditor garnishment and it is wrong for everything else.
Per the IRS guidance on wage levies, the IRS levies wages administratively, on its own authority rather than through a court. For federal nontax debt, 31 CFR 285.11 lets the agency start garnishment proceedings administratively, capped at 15 percent of disposable pay, after notice and an opportunity for a hearing. Neither involves a courtroom.
So treat a notice from an agency with the same urgency as one from a court. Act on it the day it arrives, because the deadline runs whether or not a judge was ever involved.
What a Garnishment Order Looks Like
It arrives by sheriff, by process server, or by certified mail. It has a case number and a court name on it, or an agency letterhead. And buried in it, usually not on the first page and usually not in bold, are the three things you actually need, plus two more that are easy to overlook.
Note what is not on that list: the employee's side of the story, whether the debt is fair, and whether the amount seems right. None of that is your business and none of it is your decision. You are being told to do something by a body with the authority to tell you.
What to Do When One Arrives
The whole process, in sequence, from the day the order is served to the day you are told to stop.
Steps two and five are where the entire risk lives, and it is worth stating the counterintuitive part plainly: the liability is not primarily about the money. It is about the paperwork you file with the court.
You can withhold the correct amount, from the correct base, on the correct schedule, and remit it perfectly to the correct party, and still be found liable for the entire debt because your answer was defective or because you did not file the subsequent ones. The money side is what feels important. The filing side is what actually carries the exposure.
Which is why the first ten minutes should produce one piece of paper rather than a calculation. Fill this in the day the order is served, staple it to the front of the order, and the deadline stops being something you meant to go and look up.
The Answer Is the Whole Thing
The answer is your formal response to the court, and it is the single document that determines whether this is routine or catastrophic. It says whether the person works for you, what you owe them, and what you intend to withhold. It is filed with the court, not sent to the creditor, and it has a deadline set by state law.
Three things about it that employers get wrong.
First, you must answer even if the person does not work for you. Creditors send orders to possible employers, not confirmed ones. If you have never heard of the individual, you still file an answer saying so. Silence is not a response, and a non-answer can be treated as a default in exactly the same way as a late one.
Second, a defective answer is treated much like no answer at all. Filing on time is necessary and it is not sufficient, because the court is deciding what you disclosed rather than whether the envelope arrived. If the form is unclear and the amount at stake is meaningful, an hour of a lawyer's time is cheap against the alternative.
Third, in some states one answer is not enough. Under RCW 6.27.350, a Washington employer answers when the writ is served and then files a second answer within twenty days of receiving the second answer form, reporting everything withheld over the life of the continuing lien. Employers who file the first and assume they are done are exposed on the second.
How Much You Withhold
The caps differ by debt type, and every one of them except a tax levy is a percentage of disposable earnings.
| Type of debt | Federal cap | Calculated against |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary creditor garnishment | The lesser of 25 percent, or the amount by which weekly disposable earnings exceed $217.50 | Disposable earnings |
| Child support, supporting another spouse or child | Up to 50 percent, plus 5 percent more where over twelve weeks in arrears | Disposable earnings |
| Child support, not supporting another | Up to 60 percent, plus 5 percent more where over twelve weeks in arrears | Disposable earnings |
| Defaulted federal student loan | Up to 15 percent | Disposable earnings |
| Other federal debt | Generally up to 15 percent | Disposable earnings |
| IRS tax levy | No percentage cap. An exemption table by filing status and dependents | Take-home pay above the exempt amount |
| State tax levy | None. The federal caps do not apply, and each state sets its own formula | Whatever base the state formula names |
Where a state law produces a smaller garnishment than the federal rule, the state law wins. The federal caps are a ceiling on what can be taken, not a floor on what must be.
A handful of states bar wage garnishment for ordinary consumer debt almost entirely. South Carolina is one: section 37-5-104 of its consumer protection code forbids a creditor to garnish earnings for any debt arising from a consumer credit sale, lease, loan, or rental-purchase agreement.
Administrative garnishments for federal debt run on their own statutes rather than on the Consumer Credit Protection Act. 20 U.S.C. 1095a caps a defaulted federal student loan at 15 percent of disposable pay, and 31 U.S.C. 3720D sets the same ceiling for other federal nontax debt unless the employee consents in writing to more.
Disposable Earnings: What Counts and How to Calculate
Disposable earnings are gross pay minus the deductions the law requires, and nothing else. That is the whole definition, and it is what every cap in the table above is applied to. Take the calculation slowly, because getting it wrong is expensive in a way that never shows up on a report.
The subtractions that count are federal income tax, state and local income tax, the employee share of Social Security, Medicare and state unemployment insurance tax, and any withholding for a retirement system the law requires rather than the employee electing.
The Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division gives these examples in Fact Sheet #30, dated December 2024, and the test behind all of them is whether the law required the amount to be withheld.
Everything else is voluntary, and voluntary deductions do not touch the figure. Health and life insurance premiums. Retirement deferrals beyond a contribution the law mandates. Union dues. Charitable giving, savings bonds, repayment of a payroll advance. Each of them lowers the number on the check and none of them lowers the number you garnish against.
Here is the arithmetic on a weekly payroll. Follow it line by line, because the two totals it produces, disposable earnings and net pay, are the ones that get confused.
| Line | Amount | What it does to the garnishment base |
|---|---|---|
| Gross pay for the week | $800.00 | The starting figure |
| Federal income tax withheld | minus $64.00 | Required by law, so it comes off |
| State income tax withheld | minus $24.00 | Required by law, so it comes off |
| Social Security at 6.2 percent | minus $49.60 | Required by law, so it comes off |
| Medicare at 1.45 percent | minus $11.60 | Required by law, so it comes off |
| Disposable earnings | $650.80 | This is the garnishment base |
| Health premium, retirement deferral, union dues | minus $175.00 | Voluntary, so none of it reduces the base |
| Net pay | $475.80 | The figure on the check, and the wrong number to garnish against |
Now the ceiling. For an ordinary creditor garnishment the Consumer Credit Protection Act caps the weekly withholding at the lesser of two numbers: 25 percent of disposable earnings, or the amount by which disposable earnings exceed 30 times the federal minimum hourly wage. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since July 2009, which puts the second number at $217.50 a week.
Run both limbs against the example. Twenty-five percent of $650.80 is $162.70. Disposable earnings of $650.80 exceed $217.50 by $433.30. The lesser of the two is $162.70, so $162.70 is what comes out and the rest of the check is the employee's.
The second limb only bites at the bottom of the pay scale, which is what it exists for. An employee with $260 of weekly disposable earnings faces 25 percent of $260, which is $65, against an excess over $217.50 of $42.50. The smaller figure governs, so $42.50 comes out. At $217.50 a week or less, an ordinary creditor garnishment reaches nothing at all.
Two details that catch people out. The $217.50 is a weekly figure, so a biweekly payroll uses $435.00, a semimonthly one $471.25, and a monthly one $942.50, all of them set out in the fact sheet. And where a state runs the same formula against a state minimum wage above $7.25, it is the state figure you use, because it is the one that leaves the employee more.
One more, if you run a tip credit. The fact sheet is specific about tipped employees: the earnings the calculation starts from are the cash wages you pay directly plus any tip credit you claim under federal or state law.
Tips beyond that, the money the customer actually left, are not earnings for this purpose at all. So a tipped payroll is not run off the cash wage alone, and it is not run off everything the employee took home either.
Tax Levies vs Court-Ordered Garnishments
An IRS tax levy is not capped as a percentage of anything, and that one difference is where the errors start. A creditor garnishment takes the lesser of two ceilings and leaves the rest. An IRS levy inverts the logic: it takes everything except a fixed exempt amount that comes off a published table.
The notice you receive is Form 668-W, in one of its variants, and it arrives from the agency rather than from a court. It covers wages, salary, fees, bonuses, commissions, and similar income. It is a multi-part form and not all of it is yours. You keep a part for your records and hand the rest to the employee, who fills in the Statement of Dependents and Filing Status and returns it to you.
The employee has three days to do it. Per the IRS guidance for employers who receive a levy against a worker, if the statement does not come back in three days you figure the exempt amount as though the employee were married filing separately with zero dependents, which is the smallest exempt amount the table offers.
An employee who leaves that form in a drawer is choosing the worst exemption available to them and you are required to apply it, though they can hand the statement in later and have the exempt amount recalculated from that point on.
The exempt amount comes from Publication 1494, which the IRS mails with the levy. The tables are built from the standard deduction plus an amount for each dependent, spread across the pay period, and the current edition (Rev. 12-2025) carries the figures for a levy collecting tax in 2026.
Two of the publication's own worked examples show the scale: a single employee paid weekly claiming three dependents has $615.38 exempt per pay period, and an employee married filing jointly, paid biweekly, claiming two dependents has $1,646.16 exempt.
Notice what the table measures. It is take-home pay that is exempt, not disposable earnings, and take-home pay is figured on the deductions already in place when the levy arrived. An employee cannot enlarge a voluntary deduction afterwards to shrink what the levy reaches, and the Internal Revenue Manual tells employers generally not to allow new voluntary deductions once a levy is running.
Put the two side by side on the same paycheck. The creditor garnishment took $162.70, calculated on $650.80 of disposable earnings. A levy on that same employee, defaulted to married filing separately with no dependents, exempts $309.62 a week under the current table. It takes the take-home pay above that, and against net pay of $475.80 that comes to $166.18. Same employee, same week, two calculations that share nothing except the paycheck they land on.
| Dimension | Creditor garnishment | IRS tax levy |
|---|---|---|
| Who issues it | A court, after the creditor sued and won | The agency itself, with no court involved |
| The ceiling | The lesser of 25 percent of disposable earnings, or the excess over $217.50 a week | No percentage at all. Everything above the exempt amount |
| The base | Disposable earnings | Take-home pay, on the deductions in place when the levy arrived |
| Where the number comes from | The Consumer Credit Protection Act formula | Publication 1494 tables, by filing status and dependents |
| The role of the employee | None. They take a dispute to the issuing court | They complete the Statement of Dependents and Filing Status within three days |
| If the employee does nothing | The withholding runs at the calculated amount | The exemption defaults to married filing separately, zero dependents |
| When it ends | Only on a written release from the court or the agency | Continuous from the day it is served until the IRS releases it |
Which leaves priority, and here federal law is explicit in one direction only. Section 6334 of the tax code exempts from levy so much of the employee's wages as is necessary to comply with a court judgment for the support of minor children entered prior to the date of levy. A support order that predates the levy keeps getting paid, and the amount needed to comply with it is carved out of what the levy can reach.
Against an ordinary creditor garnishment there is no comparable federal ranking, and the fact sheet is blunt about it: the Consumer Credit Protection Act contains no provisions controlling the priorities of garnishments, which are set by state or other federal law, and questions about which order outranks which belong to the court or agency that issued it.
The practical outcome is usually arithmetic rather than law, because the levy takes everything above the exempt amount and generally leaves a consumer creditor order behind it with nothing to reach.
One mechanical difference to close on. A wage levy is continuous. Under section 6331(e) of the tax code it stays in effect from the date the levy is first made until the IRS releases it, so there is no running balance for you to track and no point at which you decide it has finished.
Timing is the one concession. Employers generally get at least one full pay period after the levy arrives before any money has to go to the IRS, which is close to the only breathing room anywhere in this article.
State Tax Levies and the Notice of Levy
A state tax levy is a state revenue agency doing what the IRS does: reaching wages for unpaid state tax without suing the employee first. The document that arrives is often called a notice of levy, which is also the title of the federal version, Form 668-W, Notice of Levy on Wages, Salary, and Other Income.
What does not carry across is the formula. Each state writes its own, and it usually matches neither the IRS exemption table nor the 25 percent creditor rule.
New York is a good example. According to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, its wage levy, called an income execution, follows a tax warrant rather than a lawsuit. It goes to the taxpayer first, who has 20 days to start paying 10 percent of gross income or 25 percent of disposable earnings each payday.
New York sends the income execution to the employer only when the taxpayer does not comply, and the employer then deducts up to 10 percent of gross wages each payday and remits it to the department.
So the practical rule is the one that governs every levy. Do not assume the federal arithmetic. Read the notice, find the state's own formula and its own response requirement, and where the document is silent on something, call the number printed on it before the first payroll runs.
When There Are Several
More than one order for the same employee is common, and the rule is not first-come-first-served.
Child support is withheld before all other garnishments, with a single exception: an IRS tax levy that was entered before the underlying support order was established. Per the employer guidance from the Administration for Children and Families, that levy is the only deduction that takes precedence over child support.
Note the wording, because it is a trap. The question is which was entered first, not which reached your desk first. And federal guidance acknowledges that employers generally do not know that date, which is why the recommended action when both are in play is to contact the issuing child support agency rather than to reason it out yourself.
The other thing to understand is that the cap applies to the total, not separately to each order. An employee already at the ceiling for child support has nothing available for a consumer creditor, and the correct response to that second order is to answer it saying exactly that.
What You May Not Do
Several of these rules will feel unreasonable in the moment, and breaking them anyway is how employers turn somebody else's problem into their own.
The second one is worth expanding, because it is the most common and the most sympathetic.
The employee comes to you. They explain that the debt is a mistake, or that they have made an arrangement, or that they simply cannot afford it this month. They ask you to hold off. They are not lying and they are not manipulating you; they usually believe every word.
You still cannot do it. You are complying with an order from a court or an agency, and only that court or agency can release you, in writing. If the employee thinks the order is wrong, the body they need to speak to is the one that issued it. Your sympathy is free and your compliance is not optional, and confusing the two makes you the person who ends up owing the money.
Telling the Employee
Many states require you to tell the employee. California, for one, gives an employer 10 days from service under Code of Civil Procedure 706.104 to hand the employee a copy of the earnings withholding order and its notice to employee.
Tell them even where no statute says so, because the alternative is that they find out on payday when their check is short by three hundred dollars and nobody warned them. The deduction will appear on their pay stub, itemized, whether you have prepared them for it or not.
When They Leave
Two rules, and both catch employers out.
The first is that you cannot fire them because of the garnishment. Under 15 U.S.C. 1674, no employer may discharge an employee because their earnings were garnished for any one indebtedness, however many separate proceedings were brought to collect that one debt.
The protection narrows for a second, separate debt, at which point federal law no longer bars discharge. But the first one is protected outright. Firing someone over it is a violation in its own right, entirely separate from whatever else is going on, and a willful violation carries a fine of up to $1,000 or up to a year in prison.
The second is that when the employee leaves for any reason, you must notify the issuing court or agency. The garnishment does not lapse because they walked out, and quietly ceasing to withhold without telling anybody is itself a failure to comply.
Most orders have a section for reporting the termination, and many jurisdictions impose a deadline. Some also provide that the order revives if you rehire the person within a defined window. All of that is worth knowing before the notification goes onto your offboarding checklist as a one-line afterthought.
The Student Loan Wave
A great many small employers who have never seen a garnishment order are likely to get their first one from a source they are not expecting: a defaulted federal student loan.
Administrative wage garnishment for defaulted federal student loans was paused for years, and the Department of Education moved to restart it at the beginning of 2026, starting with a small first group of defaulted borrowers.
The Department then reversed course. According to the Department of Education (January 16, 2026), involuntary collections including administrative wage garnishment and the Treasury Offset Program are delayed while it puts new repayment and rehabilitation options in place, and the announcement named no date for restarting them.
So the honest position is that the restart was announced, then delayed before any money moved, and nothing has repealed the authority.
That is not a reason to relax. According to the Department of Education (April 2025), more than 5 million borrowers were in default when it announced the return of collections. When garnishment does resume, it will reach employers who have never processed an order of any kind.
The Records You Will Need
Garnishment disputes are almost never arguments about money. They are arguments about whether you did what you were required to do, and when, and the entire question is settled by documents. Which makes this a document management problem wearing a payroll costume.
| What to keep | Why | When you will need it |
|---|---|---|
| The order itself, date-stamped on receipt | The deadline runs from service. The date you received it is the fact everything else depends on | Immediately, and again if the timing is ever questioned |
| The answer you filed, and proof of when | This is the document that carries the full-debt liability. Proving you filed it, correctly and on time, is the entire defense | In any dispute. This is the single most important record in the file |
| Every calculation of disposable earnings | The amount withheld has to be defensible, and the base you used is where errors hide | If the employee or the creditor disputes the amount |
| Every remittance, with proof of payment | You have to show the money went where it was supposed to, on time | If the creditor claims they were not paid, which happens |
| The notice you gave the employee | Required in many states, and it is the record that you did not blindside them | In a state that requires notice, or in any dispute with the employee |
| All correspondence with the court or agency | Including anything you were told by phone. Note the date, the person, and what they said | When somebody later disagrees about what you were instructed to do |
| The written release, when it comes | This is what entitles you to stop. Stopping without it is a compliance failure even if the debt really was satisfied | Whenever anybody asks why the withholding ended |
Two of those rows are a log rather than a document. The calculation and the remittance happen again every pay period, and what a creditor eventually asks for is the line for a specific week: what the base was, which of the two limits produced the smaller figure, what came out, and where it went. One row per pay period, written at the time.
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pay period end | Pay date | Gross pay | Deductions required by law | Disposable earnings | Percentage limit for this order | Excess over the floor for this pay frequency | Amount withheld | Which limit governed | Other orders withheld this period | Remitted to | Date remitted | Proof of payment reference | Prepared by |
| 2 | Example: the weekly payroll worked through above | 800.00 | 149.20 | 650.80 | 162.70 | 433.30 | 162.70 | The percentage limit, because it is the smaller | None | |||||
| 3 | ||||||||||||||
| 4 | ||||||||||||||
| 5 | ||||||||||||||
| 6 | ||||||||||||||
| 7 | ||||||||||||||
| 8 | ||||||||||||||
| 9 | ||||||||||||||
| 10 | ||||||||||||||
| 11 |
Common Mistakes
The thread through all of them is a single misunderstanding, and it is the one this article exists to correct. An employer reads a garnishment order as information about an employee, and files it emotionally under awkward. It is not information. It is an instruction to you, from a body that can enforce it against you, with a deadline that is already running.
Read that way, the correct response is obvious and it is not complicated. Find the deadline. Answer properly and on time. Withhold against the right base. Remit on schedule. Tell the employee once, privately, without commentary. Keep the file. Stop only when released in writing.
None of that is difficult. All of it is unforgiving. And the gap between an employer who does it and one who means to get to it next week is, in the worst case, somebody else's entire debt.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is garnishment?
Garnishment is a legal procedure that requires a third party holding money belonging to a debtor to redirect that money to a creditor. In the employment context, the third party is the employer and the money is wages. The critical thing for an employer to understand is that the order is addressed to you, not to your employee. It is not a notification that your employee has a debt problem. It is a legal command that you withhold part of their pay and send it somewhere else, and your obligations under it are your own rather than theirs.
What is wage garnishment?
Wage garnishment is any legal or equitable procedure through which part of a person's earnings must be withheld by their employer to pay a debt. A court order is the usual route, though not the only one. The IRS can levy wages directly, a defaulted federal student loan can be collected through administrative garnishment, and neither of them needs a court judgment at all. What falls outside the definition is the wage assignment, where the employee voluntarily signs up to have part of their pay sent to a creditor. Nobody is compelling that deduction, so it does not count as a garnishment.
What does it mean to garnish wages?
To garnish wages means to withhold part of an employee's pay under legal compulsion and send it to a creditor rather than to the employee. From the employer's side, the money never becomes the employee's to spend: you deduct it before paying them and you remit it to whoever the order names. The employee is not being asked to pay a bill. Their pay is being intercepted, by an authority that has the power to compel you to do the intercepting, and to hold you responsible if you do not.
What is a garnishment order?
A garnishment order is the legal document that compels the withholding. Depending on the type of debt and the state, it may be called a writ of garnishment, an earnings withholding order, an income withholding order, or a notice of levy. What they have in common is that they are directed at the employer and they impose duties on the employer, typically including a deadline to formally respond to the court, a schedule for withholding, and a schedule for remitting the money. The document is not informational. It is an instruction with a deadline attached.
What is payroll garnishment?
Payroll garnishment is simply the operational side of the same thing: the process by which an employer sets up a garnishment order in payroll, calculates the correct withholding each period, deducts it, and remits it to the right place. It comes out of pay that has already been taxed, and it is calculated against disposable earnings rather than against net pay. Those are different figures and confusing them is one of the more expensive mistakes available in this area. Payroll is only part of the job, though. Your payroll system can run the withholding, but it does not hold the order, track the answer deadline, or keep the file you will need in three years when somebody asks what you did.
What happens if an employer ignores a garnishment order?
The employer can end up owing the creditor the full amount it was trying to collect. That is not a penalty sized to the withholding you missed. It is a judgment against your company for a debt your employee owes. Washington's statute shows how it works. If a garnishee lets the answer deadline set in the writ pass, the court may enter a default judgment for everything the plaintiff claimed. The employer then has seven days, counted from service of the first writ that enforces that judgment, to ask the court to reduce it to the amount the employer actually held. If that window closes as well, the full judgment stands. The imbalance is deliberate, because a business is a much easier target to collect from than the person who borrowed the money.
What is the employer's answer to a garnishment?
The employer's answer is the formal filing you make with the court that issued the writ, and some states call it a garnishee disclosure or a garnishee response instead. In it you confirm whether the named person is on your payroll and state what wages, if any, you hold for them. Nothing else in the process matters as much, and nothing else goes wrong as often. The deadline comes from state law and it is tight, commonly 14 to 30 days counted from service. Do not assume one filing finishes the job, either. Washington is one of several states that require a later answer as well, and skipping it leaves the same gap in the record as skipping the first.
How much of an employee's wages can be garnished?
It depends entirely on the type of debt. An ordinary creditor may take whichever figure is smaller: 25 percent of disposable earnings, or the part of weekly disposable earnings above 30 times the federal minimum wage, a threshold of $217.50. Child support limits run higher, at 50 percent when the employee supports another spouse or child and 60 percent when they do not, with a further 5 percent in either case once payments are over twelve weeks in arrears. A defaulted federal student loan tops out at 15 percent. An IRS levy uses no percentage at all; the employer applies an exemption table keyed to filing status and dependents.
Is garnishment calculated on gross pay or net pay?
Neither, and that is the trap. The base is disposable earnings, a separate legal figure: what remains of gross pay after the deductions the law requires, such as taxes, Social Security, Medicare, and mandatory state contributions. Voluntary items like health premiums and retirement contributions are not subtracted from it, even though they do shrink the paycheck. As a result, disposable earnings usually come out above net pay. Run the cap on net pay and you under-withhold every period, and the creditor can still hold you responsible for the difference. Tax levies are the exception: an IRS levy takes the take-home pay above a fixed exempt amount from a published table, and a state levy follows that state's own formula.
Are garnishments pre-tax or post-tax deductions?
Post-tax. A garnishment is taken after every tax has already come out of the paycheck, and it never reduces the employee's taxable wages. The sequence is what makes this clear. You start from gross pay and subtract the deductions the law requires, which gives you disposable earnings, and the garnishment cap is a percentage of that figure. The withholding itself comes out of pay the law has already taxed in full, while pre-tax items such as health premiums and retirement contributions keep reducing taxable wages exactly as they did before. So an employee asking whether the garnishment is at least lowering their tax bill is asking a reasonable question with an unwelcome answer. Everything they earned is still taxed in full, and the garnishment comes out of what is left after that.
Can I fire an employee whose wages are garnished?
Not over a single debt. Under federal law, an employer may not dismiss someone because their pay has been garnished for one debt, and that holds even when the creditor brought several separate proceedings to collect it. A willful violation carries a fine of up to $1,000, up to a year in prison, or both. Once the employee is garnished for two or more separate debts, that federal bar on discharge no longer applies, although the law in their state may still shield them. A garnishment for a defaulted federal student loan or other federal nontax debt is different again: its own statute bars discharge, refusal to employ, and disciplinary action outright. In practice, firing someone over a first garnishment breaks the law, and firing someone over a second is a decision to make with legal advice rather than on instinct.
My employee says the garnishment is a mistake. Can I stop withholding?
No. This is one of the most common ways employers land in trouble, precisely because the request sounds reasonable and the employee usually means it. They may truly think it is an error, or truly have reached a deal with the creditor. Neither of those lets you off. The obligation comes from the court or agency that issued the order, and only a written release from that same body ends it. Until you have one in hand, the withholding continues. An employee who disputes the order has to take it up with the issuer, because you have no power to change it.
What if there are multiple garnishment orders for one employee?
Priority rules apply, and the order in which the documents arrived is not what decides them. Child support comes ahead of every other garnishment. The single exception is an IRS tax levy entered before the support order it competes with was established. Below that tier, federal wage garnishment law is silent: the Consumer Credit Protection Act has no priority provisions, so state law or another federal statute supplies the ranking, and questions go to whoever issued the order. The math usually decides things anyway, because one overall limit covers every order combined instead of applying to each order separately. If child support already uses up the full limit, a consumer creditor may get nothing.
How long does a wage garnishment last?
Until the debt is satisfied or until you receive a written release, and the second half of that sentence is the operative one. You do not stop when your arithmetic says the balance should be cleared, because interest and costs may still be accruing on the underlying judgment and your calculation may simply be wrong. You stop when the court or the agency tells you in writing to stop. An employer who calculates a payoff itself and stops early risks having under-withheld, and the shortfall is then its own. An IRS wage levy works the same way: it is continuous from the day it is served until the IRS releases it.
Do I have to tell the employee about the garnishment?
Generally yes. Many states make it a formal requirement with its own timing rules, and it is worth doing even where no rule demands it. California, for example, gives an employer 10 days from service to hand the employee a copy of the earnings withholding order and its notice to employee. Without a warning, the employee discovers the garnishment when a smaller paycheck lands. Learning about it that way, with no explanation, turns a piece of administration into something personal and invites a confrontation you could have avoided. A short written notice, given privately and in a neutral tone before the first reduced paycheck, takes about ten minutes and heads off nearly all of that.
What happens to a garnishment when the employee quits?
You must notify the court or agency that issued the order, and that duty is usually spelled out rather than left to your judgment. The employee's departure does not end the garnishment by itself, and simply ceasing to withhold without a word to anyone counts as noncompliance. Most orders include a section for reporting that the job has ended, and many jurisdictions set a deadline for doing so. Send the notice promptly. For a child support income withholding order, you withhold through the final paycheck and notify the sender immediately, using the termination section of the order. Some orders also come back into force if you rehire the person within a set period.
Can I charge a fee for processing a garnishment?
In many states yes, and it is worth knowing about because the administrative burden is real and falls entirely on you. According to the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, most states let an employer charge the employee an administrative fee for processing an income withholding order, and the state where the employee works sets the amount. It is generally small, most often one to five dollars per payment or per month, and it does not come close to covering the actual work involved. But it exists, it is lawful where the state allows it, and a fair number of small employers do not realize they are entitled to it.
Does a garnishment for a student loan require a court order?
No, and that is exactly what sets administrative wage garnishment apart from what most employers expect. A federal statute gives the Department of Education the power to order an employer to withhold up to 15 percent of the disposable pay of a borrower in default on a federal student loan, and the Department never has to file a lawsuit or win a judgment to use it. The borrower is notified beforehand and can ask for a hearing. For the employer, though, the instruction simply shows up one day, and it carries the same legal force as a court order. The Department delayed these collections in January 2026 without naming a restart date, but the authority itself has not been repealed.
What records do I need to keep for a garnishment?
Everything, and retrievably. The order itself, the answer you filed and the date you filed it, every calculation of disposable earnings, every amount withheld, every remittance with proof of payment, all correspondence with the court or the agency, the notice you gave the employee, and eventually the release. The reason to be thorough is that garnishment disputes are almost always about paperwork rather than about money, and the employer who can produce a complete file is in a fundamentally different position from the one who is reconstructing events from memory. The calculation and the remittance recur every pay period, so keep them as a running log, one row per period, showing the base, which limit produced the smaller figure, what came out, and where it went.
What is the difference between a garnishment and a levy?
A levy is a specific type of garnishment used by tax authorities, and it behaves differently from an ordinary one in ways that matter. An IRS levy does not require a court judgment, arrives directly from the agency, and is not capped as a percentage of disposable earnings. Instead of a percentage, the IRS publishes an exemption table based on the employee's filing status and number of dependents, and everything above the exempt amount is taken. That exempt amount is measured against take-home pay, and if the employee does not return the Statement of Dependents and Filing Status within three days, you figure it as married filing separately with zero dependents. Applying the ordinary 25 percent rule to a levy is a standard employer error and it will produce the wrong number.
We have never received a garnishment order. Should we prepare for one?
Yes, because the moment you receive one is the worst possible moment to work out what to do. The deadline to respond is already running, it is short, and it is set by a state law you have not read. Wage garnishment also reaches ordinary employers through several unrelated channels: a consumer judgment, a child support agency, a tax authority, and a federal agency collecting a defaulted loan. Having never seen one says nothing about whether you will. The preparation is not elaborate: know who opens the mail, know that a garnishment order goes straight to whoever handles payroll, and know that the first question to answer is what the deadline is rather than what the amount is.