812.34.Exemption.

Section 812.34 is the exemption backbone of the earnings garnishment subchapter. It starts by excluding three categories of debt from any exemption at all: debts ordered under a specific debtor-relief statute or under the federal bankruptcy code’s wage-earner plan provisions, debts for the support of any person, and debts for unpaid taxes. For those debts, the exemptions in the rest of the section do not apply.

For every other kind of judgment debt, the section protects most of a debtor’s paycheck by default. Unless the court grants relief through a separate hardship provision, 80 percent of the debtor’s disposable earnings are exempt from garnishment, meaning creditors can typically reach no more than 20 percent. That protection becomes total, covering all of the debtor’s earnings, when the debtor’s household income falls below the poverty line, or when the debtor receives need-based public assistance, received it within the six months before the garnishment forms were served, or has been found eligible even without yet receiving benefits. And even outside full exemption, if garnishing 20 percent of disposable earnings would push household income below the poverty line, the garnishment is limited to only the amount above that line.

To make these poverty-line calculations usable in practice, the section directs the judicial conference to adopt and publish schedules and worksheets that help debtors figure out their eligibility. Those schedules divide the annual poverty line by the number of pay periods in a year, separately for weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, and monthly pay schedules, rounding to the nearest dollar, and must be revised every year to track changes in the federal poverty line, taking effect each July 1 for garnishments and extensions that begin afterward.