Methodology

Citation hierarchy

1. Tier 1 — primary: state-legislature official URLs (e.g. NY CPLR §5231 on nysenate.gov, Fla. Stat. §222.11 on flsenate.gov), Cornell LII for federal USC, eCFR.gov for federal regulation, federal-agency primary URLs (DOL, IRS, SSA).
2. Tier 2 — supplementary only: Justia state-statute mirrors, Nolo plain-English summaries, ConsumerFinance.gov consumer-facing pages. Used only when the Tier-1 source is unreachable; never as primary citation.

Calculator formula

Formula version: v1.0.

The decoder implements 15 USC §1673(a): max garnishable per pay period = the lesser of (a) 25% of disposable earnings or (b) the amount by which disposable earnings exceed 30× the federal minimum wage. The federal-min-wage floor is normalized to the pay-period frequency: weekly = $217.50, biweekly = $435.00, semimonthly = $471.25, monthly = $942.50. Irregular/commission pay normalizes against days-since-last-payment.

Debt-type routing: consumer-judgment uses §1673(a); child-support uses §1673(b)(2) at 50%/55%/60%/65% depending on dependents + arrears; federal student loan uses 20 USC §1095a at 15%; federal tax uses 26 USC §6334 + IRS Publication 1494 (state-mirror handling inapplicable); state-tax routes to state regime.

State-mirror overrides: stricter percentage caps (NY 10%, IL 15%, MA 15%, NJ 10%) replace the federal 25% when stricter. Consumer-prohibition states (TX, NC, PA, SC) return $0 for consumer judgments. Florida §222.11 head-of-family runs as a two-tier override: ≤$750/week disposable = automatic full exemption; >$750/week = $0 absent signed waiver; waiver-signed = federal §1673 cap on disposable above $750/week threshold.

Verification + re-verification

• Every state page carries a per-page last-verified date.
• Every doctrine subsection carries its own last-verified date.
• Federal-min-wage watch: quarterly manual check at DOL primary URL. On detection of change: 48-hour window to update the calculator constant, re-run unit tests, deploy; 7-day window for reviewer to re-verify formula correctness against the new floor; update last-verified dates on every state page calculation section.
• Annual state-statute re-verification cron: each state page is re-verified annually as state legislatures amend exempt-property caps + cap-statute amounts.

Reviewer engagement

Annual attorney review in progress. We will not publish a fabricated reviewer name. The Wave-1 ship is gated on a real, licensed consumer-finance / consumer-bankruptcy attorney with verifiable bar number signing off on the calculator formula and each state-mirror override.

Reviewer-attrition protocol: if the reviewer withdraws after Gate 3 but before all waves ship, we change live state-page reviewer-attribution blocks to a "under annual re-review" notice within 30 days, freeze further wave ships, and re-run Gate 3 with a replacement reviewer.

Ethics floor — debt-resolution-mill exclusion

The editorial layer of this site does NOT promote, link to, or accept sponsorship from debt-resolution-mill operators with FTC enforcement history. This applies to in-content links, sidebar CTAs, /lawyer-match listings, and prominent placements anywhere on the site. The full list is maintained in the project's ethics-floor manifest and reflected in a public exclusionlist JSON (/data/affiliate-exclusionlist.json) that the build-time renderer reads. AdSense ad-slots are programmatic and downstream-uncontrollable; we mitigate via dashboard category-block where supported.

Reproducibility

The calculator is open in the sense that every step is shown in the output card and the underlying source code uses public statute URLs. State-page data lives in a single TypeScript file checked into the repository. There is no hidden weighting and no undisclosed cap. If you find a number we got wrong, email [email protected] — see the contact block at /about#contact.