About Garnishment Calc
A single-purpose tool: tell people, before the money leaves their paycheck, exactly how much the law allows a creditor, a support agency, the Department of Education or the IRS to take — and show the statute that says so.
Who publishes it
Garnishment Calc is written and maintained by the Garnishment Calc Editorial Team, part of an independent publisher that also runs other free calculators on separate sites. There is no law firm, debt-relief company or collection agency behind it, and nobody pays to be mentioned. We do not sell leads, take referral fees or show ads. There is no named author because the work is checked against public law rather than anyone’s personal authority — every figure on the site links to the statute or agency table it came from, so you can verify it yourself.
Why it exists
Wage garnishment is one of the few debt-collection tools that reaches money before the debtor ever sees it, and the protection depends heavily on the state. The same $700 of weekly take-home pay can lose nothing in Texas and $175 in a state that follows the federal limit. Most online answers stop at “25%”, which is wrong for more than half of the states and wrong for every kind of debt other than an ordinary judgment. We built a calculator that applies the federal test and each state’s test side by side, says which one wins, and keeps the reasoning visible.
What it covers
- Ordinary creditor judgments (credit cards, medical bills, personal loans) under the federal Consumer Credit Protection Act and the wage-exemption law of all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
- Child-support and alimony withholding ceilings under 15 U.S.C. § 1673(b).
- Federal student-loan administrative wage garnishment (15% of disposable pay).
- IRS wage levies using the 2026 exempt-amount tables in Publication 1494.
What it does not do
It does not decide whether a judgment against you is valid, file exemption claims, or replace the court papers you were served. It does not cover bank-account levies, state tax levies, or garnishment of benefits. Exemptions that a judge grants case by case — hardship reductions, “necessary for support” claims — are described on each state page but cannot be predicted by a formula. For Mississippi, we could not re-read the official statute text on our last verification and show the federal ceiling with a visible notice until we can.
How to reach us
If a figure looks wrong, use the corrections form. Reports go into an editorial queue that is checked against the source before anything changes; see the editorial policy for how that works and the methodology for the arithmetic.