Wage garnishment in Georgia: the continuing garnishment

Georgia wage garnishment is a continuing garnishment under O.C.G.A. § 18-4-4(c)(1): one summons reaches 1,095 days of wages. The employer files a first answer 30 to 45 days after service and further answers at least every 45 days (§ 18-4-42), withholding the lesser of 25% of disposable earnings or the excess over $217.50 a week (§ 18-4-5).

Where Georgia garnishment law lives, and why this guide cites a bill

Chapter 4 of Title 18 was rewritten wholesale in 2016 and revised again by the Act quoted throughout this guide — 2020’s SB 443, effective January 1, 2021 — which among other things extended the continuing-garnishment period from 179 days to 1,095. Practice knowledge that predates those two rewrites is unreliable; the section numbers moved and the deadlines changed.

A sourcing problem sits under everything here, and it is better said than papered over. The Official Code of Georgia Annotated is published through a session-bound LexisNexis portal that cannot be deep-linked to a section and serves nothing readable to a machine. This site’s editorial policy forbids citing commercial mirrors in its place. So this guide cites the enrolled Act itself, as the General Assembly publishes it — primary, official, and verifiably serving its full text — with the O.C.G.A. section numbers named in the prose. Two cautions follow. An enrolled act displays amended text with the deleted words shown inline alongside the new ones, so every quotation below was taken only from passages with no inline edits and was verified present in the served PDF. And an act is a snapshot: the chapter may have been amended again since January 2021, which is one of the specific things attorney review of this page must check against the current code.

The instrument: affidavit and summons of continuing garnishment

Garnishment issues on an affidavit. For the wage instrument — the continuing garnishment, available against “an employer of or under periodic obligations for payment to the defendant” — the affidavit must add exactly that belief: “an affidavit of continuing garnishment shall state that the plaintiff believes that the garnishee is or may be an employer of or under periodic obligations for payment to the defendant and subject to continuing garnishment” (§ 18-4-41).

The summons then does the commanding. Under § 18-4-42(c), it obligates the garnishee “(1) To file a first garnishee answer with the court issuing such summons not sooner than 30 days and not later than 45 days after service of the summons of continuing garnishment, for the period of time from the date of service through and including the day of the first garnishee answer,” to file subsequent answers for the rest of the period, and to send the withheld money concurrently with each answer.

The period is what makes the instrument worth its filing fee: “The garnishment period shall begin on the day of service of the summons of garnishment” (§ 18-4-4(c)), and for a continuing garnishment it runs 1,095 days. The statutory summons form says it in capitals the employer cannot miss: “YOU MUST FILE ADDITIONAL ANSWERS UNTIL THE SOONER OF: THE PAYMENT OF THE BALANCE SHOWN ON THE SUMMONS OF GARNISHMENT, THE EXPIRATION OF 1,095 DAYS, OR THE TERMINATION OF ANY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GARNISHEE AND DEFENDANT WHICH INCLUDES PERIODIC PAYMENT OBLIGATIONS FROM GARNISHEE TO DEFENDANT.” By contrast, an ordinary (non-continuing) garnishment served on a financial institution reaches only the next five days of the account (§ 18-4-4(c)(2)) — which is why the bank writ is a snapshot and the wage writ is a stream.

The forms are not optional decoration. Under § 18-4-70(a), “the forms contained in this article shall be required to be used; provided, however, that a party may use its own format so long as it contains all of the information in the form.” A summons that drops a field from the statutory form is defective, not stylish.

Who serves whom, and the answer clock

The plaintiff serves the garnishee as provided in § 9-11-4 — in magistrate court, the constable may do it — with the affidavit, the summons, the Notice to Defendant of Right Against Garnishment of Money, Including Wages, and Other Property, and the Defendant’s Claim Form (§ 18-4-8(a)).

The defendant’s notice has a hard deadline: not more than three business days after service of the summons on the garnishee, the plaintiff must send the defendant copies of all four documents at the last known address, by regular mail and by registered or certified mail or statutory overnight delivery, and file proof of the sending with the clerk (§ 18-4-8(b)(1)). The defendant’s refusal or failure to claim the certified mail is deemed notice; a defect in this step is the classic way an otherwise sound garnishment comes apart.

The answer windows are the same shape everywhere in the chapter, and they are floors as well as ceilings. For an ordinary garnishment: “the garnishee’s answer shall be filed with the court issuing the summons not sooner than 30 days and not later than 45 days after service of the summons” (§ 18-4-10(b)). For a continuing garnishment: first answer in the same 30-to-45-day window (§ 18-4-42(c)(1)), then “Subsequent garnishee answers shall be filed not later than 45 days after the previous garnishee answer date” (§ 18-4-42(d)(1)), with the money accompanying each answer. One housekeeping rule for the non-continuing kind: no new summons issues on the same affidavit after two years from its original filing (§ 18-4-9(b)).

The exemption math: the federal formula, hard-coded

Georgia adopts the federal CCPA arithmetic and writes the numbers in. Under § 18-4-5(a)(2), the maximum part of disposable earnings for any workweek subject to garnishment is the lesser of: “(A) Twenty-five percent of the defendant’s disposable earnings for that week or, if the judgment upon which the garnishment is based arose from a private student loan, then 15 percent of the defendant’s disposable earnings for that week; or (B) The amount by which the defendant’s disposable earnings for that week exceed $217.50.” The statutory Notice to Defendant repeats it in plain terms: “Garnishment of your earnings from your employment is limited to the lesser of 25 percent of your disposable earnings for a week or the amount by which your disposable earnings for a week exceed $217.50.”

That $217.50 is thirty times the $7.25 federal minimum wage, hard-coded rather than incorporated by reference — for pay periods other than a week, the statute prorates by “the proportionate fraction or multiple of 30 hours per week at $7.25 per hour.” If the federal minimum wage ever rises, the federal floor in 15 U.S.C. § 1673 would move while Georgia’s printed number stood still, and the more protective figure would control. The 15% ceiling for private student loan judgments is Georgia’s own, stricter than federal law requires.

A garnishee that is not the defendant’s employer — a bank, typically — is deemed to have no knowledge of the defendant’s disposable earnings and may answer without computing exemptions until served with a court order or filed modification form saying otherwise (§ 18-4-5(a)(4)). The earnings exemption travels with the defendant’s claim, not automatically with the money. And whatever the math yields, federal law bars the employer from discharging the defendant over garnishment for any one indebtedness (15 U.S.C. § 1674(a)).

Priority and support

The § 18-4-5 limits are expressly “[s]ubject to the limitations set forth in Code Sections 18-4-6 and 18-4-53” — the exemption-claim article and the continuing garnishment for support, which is its own instrument under its own article. A continuing garnishment for support does not run on the 1,095-day clock at all: it “shall remain for so long as the defendant is employed by the garnishee and shall not terminate until the original arrearage is retired” (§ 18-4-4(c)(3)). At the federal layer, a support order may take 50 to 65 percent of disposable earnings under 15 U.S.C. § 1673(b)(2), which as a practical matter can leave nothing inside the 25% band for a commercial creditor’s garnishment while support withholding runs.

What this guide does not state, because it could not be verified from primary text: the precise ordering rule between two simultaneous continuing garnishments from different judgment creditors against the same wages. Treat that as an open question for the reviewing attorney, not as first-served-wins by assumption.

Interest, and what is still unresolved

Judgment interest in Georgia runs under O.C.G.A. § 7-4-12: annual interest at the Federal Reserve prime rate as of the day the judgment is entered, plus 3 percent — and where the judgment is on a written contract providing a rate, at the contract rate. That section is stated here on its official citation without a link, because Georgia publishes no official text of it at a stable public address, and this site does not link commercial mirrors to fill such a gap. A three-year garnishment stream makes the accrual basis matter: the rate fixes at entry, so the payoff arithmetic is stable, but it must be applied to each disbursement cycle.

Still unresolved, stated plainly: whether Chapter 18-4 has been amended since the 2020 Act this guide quotes; the text of § 7-4-12 against an official source; the priority ordering between competing commercial continuing garnishments; and the operative deadline for the final answer of a garnishment period, which the enrolled act’s summons form shows only with its superseded language struck inline. Each of these is exactly what the attorney-review pass for this page must settle against the current O.C.G.A.

This is an informational reference, not legal advice, and using it creates no attorney-client relationship. Limitations periods turn on facts this page cannot know — which state's law governs, the contract type, when the claim accrued, and whether anything tolled or revived it. Confirm against the primary source and your own counsel before acting.