Earnings Arrestment and Bank Arrestment in Scotland

This page is about Scots law. Earnings arrestment and bank arrestment are Scottish diligences, entirely separate from an English attachment of earnings order or a third party debt order, and they run under different statutes with different figures. If your employer or bank account is in England or Wales, this page's figures do not apply to you; read attachment of earnings instead, or start at the Scotland and Northern Ireland enforcement hub if you are unsure which system applies.

Get one figure right before anything else, because an earlier draft of this material had it backwards. The amount automatically protected in a bank account under bank arrestment is £1,000. The £750 figure belongs to earnings arrestment deduction tables, not to bank arrestment. The two diligences are governed by different provisions and have been deliberately decoupled from each other since November 2022. Mixing them up in either direction gives a debtor or an adviser the wrong number, and because the two figures once matched, it often takes a second check against the actual letter or schedule to be sure which one applies.

Earnings arrestment: how deductions from pay work

Earnings arrestment is a diligence against a debtor's earnings, created to replace the older common-law arrestment of wages. It requires the same charge for payment precondition as most other diligence, described on the sheriff officers and diligence page: once the charge has been served and its period has expired unpaid, the creditor can serve an earnings arrestment schedule on the debtor's employer, who is then obliged to deduct money from each payment of wages and send it toward the debt.

The amount deducted is not negotiated. It is read off statutory tables that set out bands of net earnings and the deduction that applies to each band, and the current tables took effect from 6 April 2025. For weekly pay, Table A sets nil deduction on earnings not exceeding £172.61, then a deduction of £2.30 or 15% of the excess over £172.61, whichever is greater, up to £345.22, rising through further bands to a rate of 50% on earnings above £863.06. For monthly pay, Table B sets nil deduction on earnings not exceeding £750, then a deduction of £10 or 15% of the excess over £750, whichever is greater, up to £1,500, rising through further bands to 50% on earnings above £3,750. An employer who fails to make the deductions correctly, or fails to operate a valid schedule at all, is not simply making an administrative slip; the employer has a statutory obligation to comply once served. Payroll software can occasionally apply the wrong table, and a genuine error like that is usually corrected once flagged, but an employer who ignores a valid schedule altogether is a different matter.

Bank arrestment: the protected minimum balance, and why it is not £750

Bank arrestment is diligence against funds a debtor holds in an account rather than against wages. Like earnings arrestment it normally needs a charge for payment to have been served first, and it attaches money in the account by serving a schedule on the bank rather than on an employer.

The amount actually protected is set out in its own subsection: where the balance in the account exceeds £1,000, only the amount above £1,000 is attached; where the balance is £1,000 or less, nothing is attached at all. This £1,000 figure has been in force since 1 November 2022, when the Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Act 2022 deliberately rewrote the provision to state the figure directly rather than cross-referring to the earnings arrestment tables. Before that amendment, the protected balance for bank arrestment had been tied to the same Table B threshold that still governs earnings arrestment today, which is exactly why the two figures are so easy to confuse: they used to be the same number, and they are not any more. Table B moved to £750 for earnings arrestment on 6 April 2025, entirely independently of bank arrestment, because the two diligences had already been split apart by the 2022 amendment. Whether the £1,000 protection applies at all depends on the type of account: it covers an ordinary personal account, but the rule does not extend to a business or trading account, or to an account held by a company, limited liability partnership, partnership, or unincorporated association, and no exception to that carve-out has been identified in the current law.

Why these figures matter, side by side

If you take one figure away from this page, it should be the bottom row. Bank arrestment protects £1,000, not £750. The £750 figure is real and correctly cited, but it belongs to the monthly earnings arrestment table, and using it to describe how much of a bank balance is safe would understate the true protection by £250.

What happens after a schedule is served

For earnings arrestment, the employer continues deducting from each pay period until the debt named in the schedule, including any interest and expenses that form part of it, is paid off, or until the schedule is withdrawn. Changing employer does not end the debt, though a new schedule usually has to be served on the new employer before deductions resume there. For bank arrestment, the bank freezes the funds above the protected balance at the moment the schedule is served, a snapshot rather than an ongoing deduction, and a further legal step is normally needed before the frozen funds are actually paid over to the creditor. Money paid into the account afterwards is not automatically caught by the same arrestment.

What to do if either diligence is used against you

Check which diligence is actually in play, because the rules, the figures, and what your employer or bank is required to do are different for each. A deduction or a frozen balance that looks wrong may simply reflect which table or figure applies to your case, though a bank or an employer can misapply the rules too, so checking the actual figure yourself is worthwhile before assuming either side has made a mistake. If it is a bank arrestment, confirm the balance at the date the schedule was served and check that at least £1,000 has been left untouched; if it is earnings arrestment, check the deduction against the correct table for how often you are paid, since applying the weekly table to a monthly wage, or the reverse, produces the wrong number. If the deduction leaves you unable to meet essential costs, a time to pay order can still be sought after diligence has started, and the Debt Arrangement Scheme can bring a moratorium that stops further diligence while an application to it is under way. Get independent advice before assuming either figure is being applied correctly, since a wrong deduction is easier to challenge quickly than to unwind later.

The key point

Earnings arrestment and bank arrestment are separate Scottish diligences with separate statutory figures. Earnings arrestment protects net pay up to £750 a month, or £172.61 a week, under tables in force since 6 April 2025. Bank arrestment protects the first £1,000 in an account, under a figure in force since 1 November 2022 that has been deliberately decoupled from the earnings arrestment tables. Neither figure should be applied to the other diligence, and in practice that mix-up is the single most common error this page exists to prevent.