Florida Judgment Enforcement: 6 Things a Creditor Can Seize and 4 They Cannot

What Changes the Morning After the Judgment Is Recorded

A judgment by itself does not move money. It is an entitlement, and in Florida the entitlement gets converted into cash through four separate machines: garnishment under chapter 77, execution and sale under chapter 56, statutory liens under chapter 55, and proceedings supplementary, also under chapter 56. Each has its own filing, its own clock and its own weakness, and knowing which machine is running against you is the difference between negotiating with information and negotiating with fear.

The other thing worth understanding on day one is that Florida draws a hard line between property of a company and property of a person. Every exemption discussed at the end of this page belongs to an individual. If the judgment names your LLC, your corporation or your partnership, the entity has no homestead, no wage protection, no vehicle allowance and no retirement shelter, and the notice procedure that hands an individual a claim-of-exemption form does not even get generated. That asymmetry is the single most misunderstood fact in Florida collection.

Six things they can take, in the order a competent creditor’s counsel actually reaches for them, then four they cannot, with the reasons each one holds.

1. The Operating Account, and the Days That Follow Service

Fla. Stat. §77.01 gives a judgment holder the right to a writ of garnishment reaching debts owed to you by a third party, debts that will become due through the passage of time, and tangible or intangible personal property of yours in a third person’s possession or control. After judgment the creditor obtains the writ under §77.03 by filing a motion stating the amount, which means no hearing, no notice to you, and no opportunity to be heard before your bank is served.

The bite is defined by §77.06(1): service of the writ makes the garnishee liable for all debts it owes you and for any tangible or intangible personal property of yours in its possession or control at the time of service, or at any time between service and the garnishee’s answer. That trailing clause is the part merchants get wrong. The account is not frozen at the balance shown at the instant of service; deposits arriving over the following days can be swept in as well, and the window stays open until the answer is filed. Under §77.04 the writ requires the garnishee to answer within 20 days of service.

The response deadlines are short and they run against you. Under §77.055 the plaintiff serves the garnishee’s answer and a notice within 5 days, and under §77.07(2) you and any other person with a disclosed ownership interest have 20 days from the date on that certificate of service to move to dissolve, on the ground that an allegation in the motion for the writ is untrue. Miss it and the fight gets much harder.

Two provisions cut the creditor’s way and one cuts yours. The creditor must pay the garnishee $100 on demand under §77.28 toward the bank’s attorney fee, and that fee can be taxed against your property. But §77.07(5) automatically dissolves the writ and discharges the garnishee if the plaintiff files neither a dismissal nor a motion for final judgment within six months of filing the writ, which is a real deadline that sloppy collection files miss.

2. Invoices Your Customers Have Not Paid Yet

Nothing in Florida law requires a creditor to wait for your customer to pay you. Fla. Stat. §77.01 puts debts owed to you by a third person squarely inside the garnishment power, including debts not yet due where they will mature through the passage of time and are not evidenced by a negotiable instrument. So the same writ that hits your bank can be served on the general contractor holding your progress payment, the shipper holding your freight settlement, or the hospital system that owes your staffing company on a thirty day cycle.

There is a second and quieter route to the same money. A judgment lien certificate filed with the Department of State under §55.202 attaches not only to personal property in this state subject to execution but expressly to all payment intangibles and accounts of a judgment debtor located here. That is a blanket claim on your receivable book, recorded in a public database, sitting alongside whatever UCC-1 your funder already filed, and it does not require the creditor to identify a single customer by name.

Timing decides who wins the individual invoice. Under §55.205(7) an account debtor may discharge its obligation by paying you until it is served with legal process seeking judicial relief, so a customer who pays before the writ lands has paid properly and owes nothing further. Once served, the customer will pay the court instead, and it will also learn that you have a judgment against you. In the files we work, that commercial consequence often costs more than the amount garnished.

3. Equipment and Inventory, Through a Filing in Tallahassee

Two separate mechanisms reach your hard assets. The first is old and physical: Fla. Stat. §56.061 makes lands and tenements, goods and chattels, equities of redemption in real and personal property, stock in corporations, and a vendee’s interest under a retained title or conditional sale contract subject to levy and sale under execution. The sheriff levies, and under §56.21 notice of the sale is advertised once each week for four successive weeks, with the sale no earlier than 30 days after the first advertisement, plus certified mail notice to you and to every judgment creditor, lienholder and secured creditor of record.

The second is newer and quieter. Under §55.202 a judgment lien on personal property is acquired by filing a judgment lien certificate with the Florida Department of State after the judgment becomes final, and the certificate contents are specified in §55.203. It reaches all personal property in the state subject to execution, and it excludes fixtures, money, negotiable instruments and mortgages. Priority is fixed at the date and time of filing, and a creditor may file only one effective certificate on a given judgment, subject to the second-lien mechanism in §55.204(3).

The duration is the part worth calendaring. Under §55.204 the lien lapses and becomes invalid five years after filing, and a second certificate may be filed within the six months before or the six months after that scheduled lapse. The replacement lien permanently lapses five years after its own filing date, and no further liens on that judgment may be acquired. There is also a 90-day tail after lapse as to itemized property already delivered to the sheriff. What ranks ahead of the creditor is set by §55.205(2): buyers in the ordinary course of business and holders of perfected security interests in after-acquired property take priority, which is why a funder with a first-position UCC-1 usually outranks the judgment creditor on the same equipment.

4. Real Property, Through a Certified Copy at the County

Real estate works on an entirely separate track from personal property, and it is the cheapest lien a creditor can buy. Under Fla. Stat. §55.10(1) a judgment becomes a lien on real property in any county when a certified copy of it is recorded in that county’s official records or judgment lien record, provided the judgment itself contains the address of the person holding the lien or an affidavit with that address is filed simultaneously. That address requirement is a genuine defect point, because it is the step careless creditors skip.

For anything recorded on or after July 1, 1994, the lien runs ten years from the date of recording. Under §55.10(2) it can be extended by rerecording a certified copy before expiration together with an affidavit stating the lienholder’s current address, which buys another ten years. Section 55.10(3) caps the whole exercise: no extension can carry the lien past the limit in §55.081 or past satisfaction, whichever comes first, and §55.081 says no judgment shall be a lien on real or personal property after 20 years from the date of entry.

What this touches is every parcel your company holds in the county of recording, plus non-homestead real estate held by an individual judgment debtor: the rental duplex, the vacant lot, the warehouse titled personally rather than in the operating entity. What it does not touch is a qualifying homestead, because the exemption blocks the lien from attaching at all rather than merely blocking a sale, and that distinction is worked through on our page about the homestead and a personal guarantee.

5. Your LLC Interest, Where One Member Changes the Outcome

Fla. Stat. §605.0503(1) lets a court, on a judgment creditor’s application, enter a charging order against the judgment debtor member’s transferable interest. The order is a lien on that transferable interest and requires the company to pay to the creditor any distribution that would otherwise go to the member. What it does not do is make the creditor a member, hand it voting rights, give it access to company assets, or let it force a distribution. Under §605.0503(2) the member keeps whatever exemption rights apply to the interest.

For a company with more than one member, that is the end of the road. Section 605.0503(3) makes the charging order the sole and exclusive remedy by which a judgment creditor may satisfy a judgment out of the member’s interest, and §605.0503(6) states flatly that foreclosure on a multi-member judgment debtor’s interest or on the rights to distribution is not available and may not be ordered by a court. A creditor holding a charging order against a member of a real operating partnership can end up waiting years for a distribution that never comes.

The single-member company is a different statute. Under §605.0503(4), where the LLC has only one member and the creditor establishes that distributions under a charging order will not satisfy the judgment within a reasonable time, the charging order is no longer the exclusive remedy and the court may order a foreclosure sale of the member’s interest. Section 605.0503(5) then describes what the buyer gets: the member’s entire limited liability company interest, not merely the rights of a transferee, membership in the company, and the judgment debtor ceases to be a member.

Read that sequence against how most small Florida businesses are actually organized. A single-member LLC holding the trucks, the contracts and the customer list can be transferred whole to a judgment creditor at a foreclosure sale, with the owner losing the company rather than just the distributions. Section 605.0503(7) also preserves the creditor’s other theories, including consensual security interests, fraudulent transfer principles, alter ego and constructive trust, so adding a nominal second member after the judgment is not the answer it looks like.

6. Anyone Holding Your Property, Pulled Into the Case

Proceedings supplementary under Fla. Stat. §56.29 are what a creditor uses when the obvious accounts came back empty. The creditor holding an unsatisfied judgment or a chapter 55 judgment lien files a motion with an affidavit describing property of yours that is not exempt from execution and is in the hands of any person, together with the court, the case number and the amount still owed with costs and interest. No new case is opened and no new summons issues; it all happens inside the file that produced the judgment.

The court then issues a Notice to Appear under §56.29(2) directed to any person holding your property or owing an obligation to you, requiring an affidavit by a date certain that cannot be less than seven business days from service, describing the property, debt or obligation with reasonable particularity and advising the recipient of discovery rights and of the availability of a jury trial. This is the impleader mechanism, and its consequence is at §56.29(6)(a): the court may order property of the judgment debtor levied on and applied to the judgment, and may enter money judgments against any person to whom a Notice to Appear was directed.

Think about who that captures. The affiliate that bought your equipment at a friendly price. The relative on the title of the company truck. The successor entity operating out of the same yard with the same phone number. Each of them can be brought in and can leave with a judgment of its own, without ever having been sued in the ordinary sense. Section 56.29(8) permits reasonable attorney fees to be taxed against the judgment debtor, so the cost of running the machinery lands on you as well.

And 4 Things They Cannot Reach in Florida

Every item below protects a person, not a business. If the judgment runs against your entity, none of it applies to the entity’s bank account, its trucks or its receivables, and the corporate account will not even generate the notice that starts an exemption claim. These matter when the guarantee has been enforced and a judgment now names you individually, which is the posture most readers of this page are actually in.

The first is the homestead. Article X, §4 of the Florida Constitution exempts it from forced sale with no dollar cap and provides that no judgment, decree or execution shall be a lien on it, subject to acreage limits of one half acre inside a municipality and 160 acres outside, ownership by a natural person, and carve-outs for property taxes, purchase and improvement obligations, and labor on the realty. A recorded certified copy under §55.10 simply does not attach while the property qualifies. The acreage arithmetic, the residency requirement and the federal bankruptcy caps are covered separately on our Florida homestead page.

The second is head-of-family earnings under Fla. Stat. §222.11. A head of family is a natural person providing more than one half of the support for a child or other dependent, and all disposable earnings of a head of family at or under $750 a week are exempt, with anything above that reachable only if you signed a written waiver in a separate attached document, in the same language as the contract, printed in at least 14 point type. The provision that surprises collectors is the deposit rule: exempt earnings credited or deposited in a financial institution stay exempt from attachment or garnishment for six months after receipt, and commingling does not defeat traceability so long as the funds can be traced and identified.

The third is property held as a tenancy by the entireties where only one spouse signed. A creditor of one spouse alone cannot execute against it, Florida presumes entireties ownership in real property conveyed to a married couple, and Beal Bank, SSB v. Almand & Associates, 780 So. 2d 45 (Fla. 2001), extended that presumption to bank accounts titled in both names where the unities are present and the signature card does not say otherwise. If the funder took both signatures on the guarantee, the protection is gone.

The fourth is long-term money. Fla. Stat. §222.21(2)(a) exempts from all claims of creditors money and assets in a fund or account maintained under Internal Revenue Code sections 401(a), 403(a), 403(b), 408, 408A, 409, 414, 457(b) or 501(a), with no dollar ceiling, and §222.21(2)(c) keeps the exemption alive for an inherited individual retirement account and for an interest received in a transfer incident to divorce. Fla. Stat. §222.14 puts the cash surrender value of life insurance and the proceeds of annuity contracts beyond attachment, garnishment or legal process in favor of a creditor of the insured or the annuity beneficiary, unless the policy was effected for that creditor’s benefit. And §222.22 protects 529 plans and Florida Prepaid contracts, health and medical savings accounts, Coverdell accounts, hurricane savings accounts and ABLE accounts.

Who Should You Call? Our Top-Rated Business Debt Firms

One firm on this list works the entire lifecycle of a business debt file, from stopping the daily debits through attorney-led negotiation, UCC lien removal, and a signed release. The other two cover broader debt categories that often sit alongside the advances. Choose accordingly.