Wage Garnishment Calculator

Disposable earnings are not your take-home pay

Every number on this page turns on one definition. Disposable earnings are gross pay minus the deductions required by law, and nothing else. That means federal, state, and local income tax; the employee share of Social Security (6.2%) and Medicare (1.45%), including the 0.9% Additional Medicare Tax once it kicks in; unemployment insurance; and contributions to a state employee retirement system that state law makes mandatory.

What does not come out: health, dental, vision, and life insurance premiums; 401(k) or other voluntary retirement deferrals; union dues; charitable giving; a company car or parking plan; and any garnishment already being withheld. Those are voluntary, so the law leaves them in the base.

So disposable earnings sit above net pay, usually well above it. A $2,000 biweekly check with $420 of taxes and FICA, $180 of health premiums, and $100 of 401(k) nets $1,300, but its disposable earnings are $1,580. Run the 25% test on the net figure and you get $325.00. Run it correctly and you get $395.00, a $70 under-withholding every period that the court will eventually notice. If you are unsure which of your deduction lines is which, the pre-tax vs post-tax deduction calculator sorts them, and the FICA tax calculator produces the Social Security and Medicare amounts if your stub does not itemize them.

The two federal tests, and which one binds

For an ordinary creditor garnishment, 15 U.S.C. 1673(a) runs two tests and takes the lesser result:

• The percentage test: 25% of disposable earnings.
• The floor test: the amount by which disposable earnings exceed 30 times the federal minimum wage, which is $217.50 a week at $7.25 an hour.

Together they produce three bands. Below the floor, nothing can be garnished at all, and that includes the case where disposable earnings land exactly on the floor, since the statute protects earnings not greater than that amount. In the middle band, between the floor and the floor divided by 0.75, the excess test wins and the answer is less than 25%. Above that breakpoint the percentage test wins and the answer is a flat 25%. DOL's own example: $500 of weekly disposable earnings gives $125.00 under the percentage test and $282.50 above the floor, so $125.00 is the maximum.

For periods longer than a week, 29 CFR 870.10 prorates the floor by the number of workweeks in the period, then multiplies by 30. That is where the multipliers come from:

• Weekly: 1 workweek, 30x, $217.50, with the 25% band starting at $290.00.
• Biweekly: 2 workweeks, 60x, $435.00, band starting at $580.00.
• Semi-monthly: 2.1667 workweeks, 65x, $471.25, band starting at $628.33.
• Monthly: 4.3333 workweeks, 130x, $942.50, band starting at $1,256.67.

Biweekly is exactly double weekly because two weeks are two workweeks. Semi-monthly is not, because 24 pay dates spread across 52 weeks give 2.1667 workweeks per period, not 2. Monthly works the same way at 4.3333. Getting that wrong is the quiet error in a lot of payroll spreadsheets, and the pay frequency converter shows where the fractions come from.

Support orders, student loans, and tax levies follow different rules

The 25% figure is only the consumer-debt answer. Three other regimes behave differently, and conflating them is how employers end up over-withholding or under-withholding.

Child and spousal support runs at 50% of disposable earnings when the employee supports another spouse or child and 60% when they do not, each rising 5 points to 55% and 65% when payments are 12 weeks or more in arrears. The 30x floor does not apply at all: 15 U.S.C. 1673(b)(1) takes support orders out of the excess test entirely. That is why the floor rows disappear from the results when you pick the support branch. The result is the allowable disposable income, and it caps the withholding even when the order names a larger amount. Support orders also take priority over every other garnishment on the same check.

Defaulted federal student loans run through administrative wage garnishment at up to 15% of disposable pay for a single order, and here the 30x floor stays intact, so the employee must be left with at least $217.50 a week. Where several withholding orders run at once, the aggregate cannot exceed 25% of disposable pay. Garnishment follows written notice at least 30 days ahead, with a right to request a hearing.

IRS wage levies are outside all of this, which is why this calculator does not try to answer for them. A levy under IRC 6331 exempts a fixed dollar amount per pay period, set by filing status and number of dependents in Publication 1494, and takes everything above it. That routinely exceeds 25% of a paycheck. State tax levies and Chapter 13 bankruptcy orders are likewise outside the CCPA percentage caps.

One more layer sits on top: state law. Title III sets the minimum protection a worker gets, and states are free to go further. Where one does, the state rule wins and the smaller garnishment applies. Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and South Carolina bar wage garnishment for most ordinary consumer debts outright, which makes the correct answer $0 there no matter what the federal arithmetic says. Others cap below 25%, or run the same excess test against a higher state minimum wage. The advanced fields let you model both without this page pretending to carry a 50-state table.

Putting the garnishment on the pay stub

Once the amount is settled, it has to print correctly. A garnishment is an after-tax deduction: it sits below the tax block, reduces net pay only, never changes gross pay or taxable wages, and never appears anywhere on a W-2. Give it its own line with a code the employee can recognize (GARN, CHLD SUP, IWO, and ED GARN are the common ones). Put a year-to-date column beside the current-period amount so they can watch the balance come down. Any employer processing fee gets its own separate line, where state law allows one at all. The YTD earnings calculator handles that running total, and a garnished stub still has to read cleanly to a landlord or lender, which the proof of income calculator covers. If the employee is leaving, the last check is still subject to the order, so run it through the final paycheck calculator as well. A miscalculated garnishment line is one of the most common pay stub errors there is.

Payslip44 models deductions in three categories (tax, pre-tax, and after-tax) with garnishments as a named after-tax example. Each line carries an amount and an optional YTD figure. Money math runs on decimals, so the withheld amount stays cent-exact across 26 periods rather than drifting a penny at a time. A recurring garnishment gets saved as a reusable item template once instead of re-keyed every payday. Everything runs on-device, and finished stubs export to PDF, PNG, CSV, or text.

Got your figure? Download Payslip44 and put the garnishment line on a real stub.