Massachusetts Debt Collection Laws: Wage Garnishment, Statute of Limitations, and Repossession

If a collector is coming after you in Massachusetts, the sequence is the part most people get wrong. A private creditor has to sue you, win a judgment, and use trustee process, Massachusetts's name for garnishment, before any of your paycheck or bank account is legally at risk. The two beliefs that cause the most damage, that garnishment can start the moment you fall behind, and that an unanswered lawsuit just fades away, are both false. Most Massachusetts garnishments start from a default judgment entered because the person being sued never filed an answer, which makes responding to a summons the single highest-value move available.

Massachusetts also builds real consumer protection into its repossession law in a way most states do not, and its bank-account exemption is unusually simple: a fixed dollar amount that protects itself, without you having to ask.

Wage Garnishment in Massachusetts

Massachusetts protects wages through trustee process rather than a garnishment writ, and its formula, at G.L. c.246 Section 28, is more protective than most. A creditor may take no more than the amount left over after reserving the greater of 85 percent of your gross wages, or 50 times the greater of the federal or Massachusetts minimum hourly wage, for each week the wages were earned. The minimum wage that feeds the 50x multiplier is set by statute: G.L. c.151 Section 1 conclusively presumes a wage of less than $15.00 per hour to be oppressive and unreasonable, and the same section provides that the state minimum rate can in no case be less than $0.50 above the effective federal minimum rate. At $15.00 an hour, 50 times the minimum wage is $750 per week, so a creditor may reach only what remains after reserving the greater of $750 or 85 percent of your gross wages for that week.

Section 28 carries a second exemption in the same section that garnishment guides routinely skip past: amounts held by a trustee for a defendant in a pension are also reserved in the trustee's hands and exempt from attachment. The statute defines pension broadly, covering any annuity, pension, profit sharing, or other retirement plan subject to ERISA, a Keogh plan maintained by a self-employed individual, a section 401(a) plan not subject to ERISA, a Simplified Employee Plan, a section 403(b) annuity plan, and an Individual Retirement Account or Annuity. One carve-out limits it: deposits made during the 5-year period before the individual's declaration of bankruptcy or entry of judgment, to the extent they exceed 7 percent of that individual's total income for the period, do not get the protection.

If a creditor attaches wages the formula protects, G.L. c.246 Section 30 makes it an offense to wilfully cause, or aid and abet in causing, exempt wages to be attached by trustee process in order to unlawfully hinder or delay their payment to the person they belong to. It runs on the complaint of the injured person, but be realistic about its size: the penalty is a fine of not more than $50, paid to the person injured. Treat it as a supplement to moving in court to dissolve or reduce an over-reaching attachment, not a substitute for doing so.

There is no separate head-of-household or family-size wage exemption in Massachusetts; the 85 percent and 50x formula applies uniformly. One notable carve-out runs the other direction: the ordinary wage-attachment protection in Section 28 does not apply to a proceeding to attach wages for a divorce, separate maintenance, or child support order. Those cases instead follow the federal support-garnishment percentage limits, which allow a creditor to take up to 50 to 65 percent of disposable earnings depending on your circumstances.

No Massachusetts statute was found extending job protection beyond the federal floor. Under 15 U.S.C. Section 1674, an employer cannot discharge an employee over a garnishment for any one debt, punishable by up to $1,000 or a year in prison, but that federal protection stops at the first debt; a second, unrelated garnishment carries no federal firing protection, and no additional Massachusetts statute was confirmed to extend it further.

State tax debt runs on a different track. The Department of Revenue does not need a judgment or trustee process at all: G.L. c.62C Section 53 lets the Commissioner collect an unpaid tax by levy on all property and rights to property belonging to the taxpayer, and a levy on salary or wages is continuous from the date it is first made until the liability is satisfied or becomes unenforceable by lapse of time. Because that is an administrative levy rather than a court attachment, the 85 percent and 50x formula in c.246 Section 28 does not govern it. If DOR levies your pay, take it up with the Department directly through a release or payment agreement, or with a tax professional, rather than assuming a garnishment percentage caps what it can take.

Bank Account Protections

Massachusetts's signature bank protection is simple and automatic. Under G.L. c.246 Section 28A, $2,500 of a natural person's funds in a trust company, savings bank, cooperative bank, credit union, or national bank operating in Massachusetts is exempt from trustee-process attachment, and the exemption is self-executing: the bank, acting as trustee, must answer as subject to attachment only the amount above $2,500, without the debtor asserting anything first. Business, trust, and organizational accounts do not get this exemption, and no individual gets more than $2,500 protected at any one time across accounts. A separate, overlapping protection exists in the general execution-exemptions statute, G.L. c.235 Section 34, which lists its own $2,500 exemption for cash, savings, and deposits alongside a $1,000 general wildcard, plus up to $5,000 of unused dollar amounts. That $5,000 stacking is narrower than it sounds: clause Seventeenth allows it only out of the unused aggregate exemptions under clauses Second, Fifth and Sixteenth, not out of unused exemption amounts generally.

Federal law layers on top of these. Under 31 CFR Part 212, a bank that receives a garnishment order must review the account and protect an amount equal to the last two months of directly deposited Social Security, VA, and certain other federal benefit payments, automatically, without the account holder needing to claim an exemption. That protection covers direct deposit only, not benefits deposited later by paper check.

Statute of Limitations on Debt in Massachusetts

Massachusetts sets a 6-year limitations period for ordinary contract actions, both express and implied, under G.L. c.260 Section 2. That single period covers written contracts, oral obligations, open accounts, and, by elimination, credit card debt, since a credit card agreement is not executed under seal. A longer 20-year period is reserved under G.L. c.260 Section 1 for contracts under seal and for promissory notes signed in the presence of an attesting witness, but only when the action is brought by the original payee or their estate.

Promissory notes follow the same split pattern. An ordinary negotiable note payable at a definite time gets 6 years from the due date, or from an accelerated due date, under Massachusetts's UCC Article 3 (G.L. c.106 Section 3-118); a demand note gets 6 years from demand, or is barred after 10 years of no payment with no demand made. A witnessed note held by the original payee instead falls under the 20-year period.

Massachusetts's revival rule is genuinely more nuanced than a simple writing-only or payment-only rule. Under G.L. c.260 Section 13, an oral acknowledgment or promise is not enough on its own to take a claim out of the limitations bar; it must be contained in a writing signed by the person being charged. But under Section 14, an actual payment of principal or interest is not stripped of its ordinary legal effect by that writing requirement, so a genuine part payment can restart the clock. There is a catch: a written endorsement or memorandum of that payment made by or on behalf of the creditor is not, by itself, sufficient proof that the payment happened. In practice, a real payment can revive Massachusetts's 6-year clock, but proving it requires more than the collector's own account records, and a bare unwritten promise with no payment cannot restart the clock at all without a signed writing.

Two points hold true regardless of how a specific debt is classified. Time-barred debt is not erased debt: a collector can still ask you to pay, and it can remain on your credit report for up to 7 years under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a separate clock entirely. And suing or threatening to sue on a debt after the statute of limitations has run is a flat violation of federal Regulation F (12 CFR 1006.26).

What Debt Collectors Can and Cannot Do

Third-party collectors working Massachusetts accounts answer to the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and Regulation F. They cannot call before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. your local time, harass you, misrepresent the amount or legal status of a debt, or threaten to sue on a debt that is already time-barred. Within five days of first contacting you, a collector must send validation information, and once you dispute a debt in writing, the collector must stop reporting it as valid until it verifies the debt. Massachusetts adds its own layer, and the statute matters more than the regulation usually cited alongside it. G.L. c.93 Section 49 bars a creditor, a creditor's attorney, or an assignee of a creditor from collecting a consumer debt in an unfair, deceptive or unreasonable manner, and it spells out what that covers: disclosing the debt to third parties without the debtor's written permission, apart from credit bureau reporting or engaging an attorney; continuing to contact the debtor after an attorney representing them has asked that communications go through counsel; communicating in a harassing or embarrassing way, including at unreasonable hours or frequency, with threats of violence, offensive language, or threats of action the collector does not take; and using forms that simulate judicial process. Note who that reaches: Section 49 binds the original creditor too, not only the third-party collectors the FDCPA targets.

The consequence is what gives the section teeth. Failure to comply with Section 49 is itself an unfair or deceptive act or practice under chapter 93A, which carries a private consumer remedy under G.L. c.93A Section 9: actual damages or $25, whichever is greater, up to three but not less than two times actual damages for a willful or knowing violation or a bad faith refusal to settle, plus reasonable attorney's fees and costs to a prevailing plaintiff. That route requires a written demand for relief mailed to the prospective defendant at least 30 days before filing suit. On top of the statute, the Attorney General's debt collection regulation at 940 CMR 7.00 adds state-specific limits on contact frequency and required disclosures.

Car Repossession in Massachusetts

Massachusetts enacted the standard UCC self-help rule at G.L. c.106 Article 9 Section 9-609: a secured party may take possession through judicial process, or without judicial process if it proceeds without a breach of the peace. But Massachusetts layers a significantly more protective structure on top of that baseline for consumer transactions.

Under G.L. c.255 Section 13J, self-help repossession without a prior court hearing is allowed only in a narrow lane: the default has to be material, meaning a missed payment or an event that substantially impairs the collateral's value, and the creditor has to be able to take possession without force, without a breach of the peace, and, absent the debtor's consent, without entering property the debtor owns or rents. Outside that lane, a creditor under a consumer credit transaction may proceed against the collateral only after a prior hearing, with the debtor given 7 or more days' written notice of the hearing date. That is a real, structural check most states do not impose.

Two overlapping cure-and-redemption regimes apply to different collateral, and their timelines are not the same number restated. General consumer collateral falls under G.L. c.255 Section 13I: the creditor sends a notice of default 10 or more days after the default, and the debtor then has 21 days from when the notice is mailed to cure by paying all unpaid sums due, without acceleration, provided the creditor has not already accelerated, sued, or repossessed. If the collateral is repossessed anyway, the debtor gets a separate 20-day window after repossession to redeem by paying the full debt plus reasonable expenses. Motor vehicles under a retail installment contract instead fall under G.L. c.255B Section 20A, which uses the same 10-day notice trigger and a parallel but separately numbered 21-day pre-repossession cure window and 20-day post-repossession redemption window. Do not collapse the two regimes' day counts into a single figure; c.255 Section 13I and c.255B Section 20A set their own deadlines under separate statutes, and which one governs depends on the collateral.

Massachusetts also caps deficiency exposure on small transactions. Under G.L. c.255 Section 13J, for a consumer credit transaction with an unpaid balance of $2,000 or less, secured by a non-possessory interest in consumer goods, a debtor who has the collateral repossessed or voluntarily surrenders it owes no deficiency at all. Above that threshold, the general UCC Article 9 disposition and deficiency rules apply unless displaced by Sections 13I or 13J. A narrow, unrelated overlay exists for hospital equipment: when the debtor is a licensed hospital and the collateral is a medical device, the secured party must give both the hospital and the Department of Public Health 60 days' written notice before taking possession, a rule with no bearing on ordinary consumer repossession.

Servicemembers get one further protection: for a vehicle financed before military service, the federal Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (50 U.S.C. 3952) requires a court order before repossession.

If You Are Being Garnished or Sued in Massachusetts

Move in this order. First, if you are served with a lawsuit, file an answer before the deadline, even a bare general denial, because a default judgment forfeits every defense you had, including the statute of limitations. Second, if trustee process is already running against your wages or bank account, check the math against the 85 percent and 50x-minimum-wage formula, and remember that $2,500 in a bank account is automatically protected before a creditor can reach it. Third, if the debt is old, raise the statute of limitations yourself; the court will not raise it for you, and be cautious about making any payment on it. Finally, if a secured loan is behind, use the hearing right or cure window described above before a creditor can lawfully take the collateral, and if the overall debt picture is unmanageable, bankruptcy's automatic stay stops most trustee process and collection lawsuits while the case is pending.

Information last verified on 2026-08-12. This article has not yet been reviewed by a licensed lawyer.

Related Resources

• Debt Collection Laws by State
• Statute of Limitations on Debt
• How to Stop Wage Garnishment
• Car Repossession Laws
• Can Social Security Be Garnished?
• Massachusetts Statute of Limitations
• Massachusetts Bankruptcy

---

Last updated: 2026-08-12.

More Massachusetts Laws

• Massachusetts Final Paycheck Laws
• Massachusetts Statute of Limitations
• Massachusetts Unclaimed Property