Sued for a debt: what actually happens, from summons to garnishment

An old, unpaid debt doesn't just sit there indefinitely — at some point, whoever currently owns it can sue you for the full balance. What happens next is mostly mechanical, moves on fixed deadlines, and depends heavily on one early decision: whether you respond at all. This page covers the sequence, not legal advice for your specific case — if you've actually been served, the deadlines below are real and worth acting on quickly.

Who's actually suing you

The plaintiff on the paperwork is often not the company you originally borrowed from. Charged-off accounts are routinely sold, sometimes more than once, to a debt buyer that purchases old debt for pennies on the dollar and then pursues it directly. Because the debt buyer wasn't the original creditor, it has to prove it actually owns your specific account — an unbroken chain of assignment documents from the original creditor down to the plaintiff, not just a spreadsheet listing a bundled portfolio of accounts. A missing or incomplete link in that chain is a real, recognized basis to challenge a debt buyer's legal standing to sue you at all, separate from whether the underlying debt itself is genuine.

Being served, and the clock that starts immediately

Being formally served with a summons and complaint starts a strict deadline to file a written response — commonly called an "Answer" — with the court. That deadline is set by the state or court where the case is filed, not by any federal rule, and it varies: some jurisdictions allow around 20 days, others closer to 30. There is no single national number, which makes checking the actual date printed on your own summons more important than any general figure.

Ignoring it doesn't make it go away. Missing the deadline lets the plaintiff ask the court for a default judgment — a ruling in the plaintiff's favor without a trial, simply because you didn't respond in time. A default judgment carries the same legal weight as one you fought and lost, and once entered, the standing, statute-of-limitations, and validity defenses you might have had are generally no longer available to raise.

What a judgment actually allows

A money judgment by itself doesn't reach into your paycheck or bank account automatically — it gives the creditor the legal right to ask a court for specific collection tools, most commonly a wage garnishment order or a bank account levy, and in some states a lien against real property you own. A civil judgment also generally doesn't expire quickly: most states let it stand for somewhere in the range of five to twenty years before it lapses, and most also let the creditor renew it for one or more additional terms before that deadline arrives — California and New York, for example, allow renewal for additional 10-year terms, essentially indefinitely, while other states set shorter renewal windows. Exactly how long an unpaid judgment can remain collectible against you is a real, state-specific question worth checking directly rather than assuming it expires on its own.

The federal wage-garnishment cap — and the four states that go further

For an ordinary consumer debt, federal law (the Consumer Credit Protection Act, Title III, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1671–1677) caps how much of your paycheck can be garnished at all, nationwide: the lesser of (a) 25% of your disposable earnings for that week, or (b) the amount by which your disposable earnings exceed 30 times the federal minimum wage. At the current $7.25 federal minimum wage, that second figure is $217.50 a week — meaning weekly disposable earnings at or below that amount generally can't be garnished for a consumer debt at all, regardless of the 25% figure. This cap is a floor of protection nationwide, but several states go further: Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and South Carolina each generally bar wage garnishment by an ordinary private creditor for a consumer debt entirely, under their own state law — though none of these state protections extend to child support, most tax debt, or federal student loan collection, which follow separate federal rules regardless of state.

Bank levies, and the federal-benefits protection that's automatic

A judgment can also let a creditor freeze and seize funds directly from a bank account through a levy. Since 2011, a federal interagency rule (31 C.F.R. Part 212) requires a bank that receives a garnishment order to automatically check, before freezing anything, whether Social Security, SSI, VA, federal civil service retirement, or certain other federal benefit payments were deposited directly into that account within the preceding two months — and if so, to protect an amount equal to that total from the levy without you having to ask. This protection is automatic only for benefits received by direct deposit; a paper check that was cashed and the cash later deposited generally doesn't carry the same automatic protection, and money that's been in the account longer than the two-month lookback, or has been substantially mixed with other funds, can complicate a bank's ability to identify it as protected.

You still have real defenses — using them requires actually responding

None of the above is a reason to assume a lawsuit can't be fought. If the debt is old enough, your state's statute of limitations may be a complete defense — see our explainer on time-barred debt for how that clock works and how a payment can sometimes restart it. If a debt collector was involved before the lawsuit, your FDCPA validation rights may already have required them to prove the debt's amount and ownership — see our debt-validation-letter explainer. And a debt buyer's chain-of-title gap, described above, is a defense many people never realize exists. Every one of these has to be raised in a timely, filed Answer — none of them help after a default judgment has already been entered.

Related: enrolling in a debt settlement program does not pause or prevent any of this — see what to actually expect from debt settlement for why a real share of people in a settlement program get sued mid-program. Most states, and many courts, also have free or reduced-cost legal-aid resources for exactly this situation — worth checking before a deadline passes, not after.