How to collect a judgment in Florida: judgment liens, garnishment and proceedings supplementary

To collect a judgment in Florida you record a judgment lien certificate with the Department of State under Fla. Stat. 55.202, locate the debtor's bank account, and serve a writ of garnishment under chapter 77. If the money has moved, Fla. Stat. 56.29 proceedings supplementary let you pull property held by third parties into the same case, without filing a separate lawsuit. The judgment is enforceable for twenty years, but the lien lapses in five, and the single most common reason Florida creditors recover nothing is that they went after an individual's wages instead of a company's operating account.

A Florida final judgment is a piece of paper that says you are owed money. It does not move a dollar. What follows is the order the work actually goes in, what each step costs you in time, and where Florida is unusually good and unusually bad for a creditor.

How long do you have to collect a judgment in Florida?

Twenty years. A Florida money judgment stays enforceable for two decades, which is among the longer periods in the country and far longer than the four or five years you had to sue on the underlying invoice in the first place.

The lien is a different clock, and this is where files get lost. A judgment lien certificate filed under Fla. Stat. 55.202 lapses five years after the date of filing. You get one renewal, and the window to file it opens six months before the original lapses and closes six months after. Take the renewal and the personal property lien runs to roughly ten years total. Miss the window and the lien is gone along with your priority against other creditors chasing the same debtor, even though the judgment itself survives untouched.

Put both dates in a calendar the day you file. Nobody remembers a five year deadline on a file they stopped thinking about in month four.

Step one: record the judgment lien certificate

Filing a judgment lien certificate with the Florida Department of State creates a lien on the debtor's personal property statewide. It is cheap, it is administrative, and it does two things worth having.

First, it establishes priority. Florida sorts competing creditors by filing order, so the date on your certificate decides whether you are first or fourth in line when a debtor's equipment or receivables get liquidated. Second, it shows up. A lien of record surfaces in due diligence when the debtor tries to borrow, sell the business or take on an investor, and a surprising share of dormant judgments get paid at exactly that moment because someone needs the lien released to close a deal.

Recording a certified copy of the judgment in the county records is the separate step that reaches real property in that county. Bear in mind that Florida's constitutional homestead protection is effectively unlimited in value, subject to acreage limits, so a lien will not reach the debtor's protected home.

Step two: find the assets before you file anything

Enforcement fails far more often from bad targeting than from bad law. Before you spend money on a writ, work out what exists and where.

The most useful asset in a commercial case is almost always the debtor's operating bank account, and you frequently already know which bank it is. If the customer paid you at any point before the relationship broke down, their bank is printed on the remittance. Going back through the deposits from that customer over the last year or two, which is a matter of turning your own PDF statements into a spreadsheet you can filter, will usually surface the account they pay from. That is the account to name in the writ.

Beyond that, look at the Florida Division of Corporations for the entity's officers, registered agent and status, and check for sibling entities registered to the same address or officers. Companies that stop paying invoices often have a newer LLC operating the same business, which matters a great deal in the next section. Also check the Department of State lien records to see who else already has a lien and where you would rank.

If you would rather have the debtor tell you, a post-judgment discovery request or a debtor's examination compels sworn answers about assets. It is slower than a garnishment on an account you already identified, but it is the right move when you genuinely do not know what the debtor has.

How to collect a money judgment in Florida with a writ of garnishment

Chapter 77 is the workhorse. A writ of garnishment reaches money owed to the judgment debtor by a third party, which in practice means a bank holding the debtor's account or a customer who owes the debtor money.

The mechanics: you obtain the writ from the clerk and serve it on the garnishee, who must answer stating what it holds. The bank freezes what is in the account at the moment of service. That timing point is the whole game. A garnishment served the morning after payroll clears catches an empty account, and one served the day a large customer payment lands catches everything. If you know the debtor's billing cycle from the years you sold to them, use it.

Garnishing a receivable is the underused version. If you know the debtor's own biggest customer, and you often do because you sold into the same industry, a writ served on that customer intercepts payments at the source. It also creates commercial pressure that a bank freeze does not, because the debtor now has to explain the garnishment to a customer of its own.

What are proceedings supplementary in Florida?

This is the part of Florida practice worth knowing about even if you never use it, because very few states have anything equivalent.

Under Fla. Stat. 56.29, when a judgment creditor holds an unsatisfied judgment or a judgment lien obtained under chapter 55, it may file a motion and an affidavit identifying the issuing court, the case number and the unsatisfied amount including accrued costs and interest, and stating that the execution is valid and outstanding. That entitles the creditor to proceedings supplementary to execution.

What that buys you is reach. Proceedings supplementary let you pursue property of the judgment debtor that sits in the possession, custody or control of third parties, inside the same case the judgment came from. Elsewhere, chasing assets a debtor transferred to an affiliate or an owner means filing a fresh fraudulent transfer lawsuit, serving it, and litigating it from scratch. In Florida you file a motion in a case that already exists and already has a judge who knows the history.

The classic fact pattern is the one described above: the debtor company is an empty shell, and a newer entity with a similar name, the same officers and the same address is doing the same work with the same equipment. Proceedings supplementary are how you make that the court's problem quickly. It is the strongest reason to hire a Florida collections attorney rather than handling enforcement yourself, and the point at which the economics usually justify one.

How to collect a small claims judgment in Florida

A small claims judgment enforces the same way as any other. Florida small claims covers county court claims up to $8,000 exclusive of costs, interest and attorney fees, and a Florida corporation or LLC is allowed to use it, which is not true in every state.

The difference is proportionality rather than procedure. On a $6,000 judgment, a judgment lien certificate and one well-timed bank garnishment are worth doing. Proceedings supplementary and a contested asset hunt usually are not, because the legal spend will overtake the recovery. Clerks in most Florida counties will walk a self-represented creditor through the garnishment paperwork, and for a single identified bank account that is often enough.

If the debtor is a going concern that simply deprioritized you, the lien plus a garnishment attempt plus patience recovers a fair number of these. The lien in particular does quiet work for years.

Why wage garnishment usually fails in Florida

If your judgment or your personal guarantee runs against an individual rather than a company, read this before spending anything.

Fla. Stat. 222.11 exempts all of the disposable earnings of a head of family whose disposable earnings are $750 a week or less. Above $750 a week, the earnings of a head of family may not be attached or garnished at all unless the debtor has agreed to it in writing, which essentially never happens. Head of family means providing more than one half of the support for a child or other dependent, so it covers a large share of working adults.

The exemption is not automatic. The debtor has to claim it in response to the writ. In practice it gets claimed, because the notice that goes out with the writ explains how.

Where it does not apply, the federal Consumer Credit Protection Act at 15 USC 1673 still caps garnishment at the lesser of 25 percent of disposable earnings for the pay period, or the amount by which those earnings exceed thirty times the federal minimum hourly wage.

The conclusion is not that guarantees are worthless. It is that in Florida the corporate judgment, the operating account and proceedings supplementary are the productive route, and an owner operator's paycheck is not. Factor that into credit decisions at the front end. The pre-judgment side of all this, including the four year limitation period that catches suppliers of goods, is set out in our guide to Florida commercial debt collection laws.

The interest you are owed while you enforce

Post-judgment interest accrues automatically and it is not small. Under Fla. Stat. 55.03 the Chief Financial Officer sets the rate by averaging the Federal Reserve Bank of New York discount rate over the preceding twelve months and adding 400 basis points. The rate for judgments obtained in the quarter beginning July 1 2026 is 8.06 percent per annum.

One mechanic gets miscalculated constantly. The rate is established at the time the judgment is obtained, and then adjusted annually on January 1 in line with the rate in effect on that date. It does not float with the quarterly publications after your judgment exists. So a payoff figure on a three year old judgment is built from three annual rates, not from today's number applied to the whole period.

At 8 percent, a $40,000 judgment accrues roughly $3,200 a year. That is worth stating plainly in settlement conversations, because a debtor weighing a discounted lump sum against interest running for up to twenty years is looking at a very different arithmetic than they assume.

When to stop

Some judgments are not collectable, and continuing to spend on them is its own loss. The signals: the entity is administratively dissolved with no successor, there are no bank accounts you can find, prior lienholders are ahead of you for more than the assets are worth, or the only target is an individual protected by the head of family exemption and homestead.

Even then, record the lien and let it sit. It costs almost nothing, it survives for years, and dormant Florida judgments get paid when a debtor needs clean title to borrow or sell. Meanwhile take the tax treatment: a business bad debt is deductible in the year it becomes worthless, when there is no reasonable expectation of repayment, which is a determination a judgment returned nothing helps you document.

The broader lesson is the boring one. Enforcement is expensive and uncertain, and the same money spent on working the account in the first ninety days recovers far more. Commercial invoices chased inside ninety days recover at around seventy percent; past a hundred and eighty days recovery often falls below fifteen. Nothing in chapter 77 or 56.29 beats an invoice that was followed up on day 3, day 15 and day 30. That is the case for keeping collections first party and running them on a schedule, and for reading the statute of limitations on unpaid invoices before a deadline decides the question for you. For enforcement outside Florida, see how to collect a judgment against a business.

This is information, not legal advice. Statutes and rates change, and enforcement practice varies by county. Confirm current law before acting on a specific file.