§ 706.050.Maximum Amount For Workweek Subject to Levy; Period Other Than Weekly

This is the central protection the Wage Garnishment Law gives working people: a hard ceiling on how much of a paycheck an ordinary earnings withholding order can take. For a weekly pay period, subdivision (a) caps withholding at the lesser of two figures — 20% of the employee's disposable earnings for that week, or 40% of whatever amount the employee's disposable earnings exceed 48 times the applicable minimum hourly wage. "Applicable" matters here: if the employee works somewhere with a local minimum wage higher than the state minimum, the higher local figure is used for that second calculation.

Because most employees aren't paid weekly, subdivision (b) translates the same protection to other pay schedules using multipliers tied to work hours: a daily pay period uses the same figures as subdivision (a); a biweekly period multiplies the applicable hourly minimum wage by 96 work hours; a semimonthly period by 104 hours; and a monthly period by 208 hours. Each multiplier is built to produce a result proportional to the weekly 48-hour threshold, just stretched across the longer pay period.

This formula took effect on September 1, 2023, and it's more protective of employees than the older approach tied to a flat federal-style formula — it lets more of a lower-wage worker's paycheck stay untouched by pegging the protected floor to the minimum wage in effect where the employee works, rather than a single national baseline. It applies "except as otherwise provided in this chapter," so different caps still govern support orders under § 706.052 and tax withholding orders under Article 4's § 706.074.