How long a money judgment stays enforceable before it must be renewed, by state
A civil money judgment does not stay enforceable forever. Every state sets a clock on it, and when the clock runs out the creditor's own state statute — not the underlying debt's statute of limitations, which is a different clock that stopped the moment the judgment was entered — decides whether the judgment can be renewed and how. This is a distinct fact from the existing state-civil-statute-of-limitations asset (which covers filing the original suit) and from time-barred-debt-revival-rules-by-state (which covers a debt that never reached judgment). The clock and the mechanism both vary sharply, and the mechanism varies more than the clock does. Ohio judgments go dormant after 5 years, California, Texas, Minnesota and Florida's recorded lien after 10, New York after 20 — but the six states built first produced five different ways of extending one. California is a true renewal: the creditor files an application before expiry and gets a fresh 10 years from the filing date. Ohio and Texas use dormancy-and-revivor: the judgment lapses automatically and can only be brought back by a separate court action, itself time-limited, and Texas gives just 2 years to revive a judgment that went dormant at 10. Florida extends by re-recording a certified copy in the county records, not by any court application. Minnesota has no renewal step: the creditor's route is to sue on the judgment within the 10 years and win a new one. New York runs two clocks at once — the judgment is conclusively presumed paid after 20 years and nothing the creditor files extends that, but the lien on the debtor's real property lasts only 10 years from the filing of the judgment-roll and is renewed by an action on the judgment under CPLR 5014, which can only be commenced in the one-year window before those 10 years expire. Florida is the same shape: a 20-year outer limit over a 10-year recorded lien. A reader who learns the number but not the shape can still miss the deadline, and on these two states the headline number is twice the number that actually matters. A creditor, a collection attorney or a judgment-purchasing firm pricing an aged judgment needs to know both numbers: how much life is left, and what has to be filed to extend it, because missing the window is one of the most common ways a fully valid judgment becomes worthless. One record per state, quoted verbatim from that state's own code. Answers 'how long is a judgment good for in [state]', 'can I renew a judgment after it expires', 'judgment dormancy period by state'. This is a deadline lookup, not legal advice: whether a specific judgment has already been renewed, revived, or satisfied is a case-specific question the statute alone doesn't answer.
The data
| State | How long the judgment stays enforceable before it must be renewed or revived | What has to happen to extend it | How the statute states the period | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| California | 10 years from the date the judgment was entered. At the end of it the judgment may not be enforced at all: enforcement procedures must cease, and any lien created by an enforcement procedure is extinguished. | Renewal by application, filed before the 10 years run out. The creditor files an application for renewal with the court that entered the judgment, and the filing itself extends enforceability for a further 10 years from the date the application is filed - no hearing and no new judgment. A narrow class of judgments identified in section 683.110(c) may be renewed only once, and for five years rather than ten. | upon the expiration of 10 years after the date of entry of a money judgment or a judgment for possession or sale of property: (a) The judgment may not be enforced. | 683.020 |
| Florida | 20 years from the date of entry. After that, no judgment, order, or decree of any court is a lien upon real or personal property anywhere in the state. A recorded lien reaches that outer limit only if it is re-recorded on the way there. | Re-recording, not a court application. The lien on real property lasts 10 years from recording, and is extended for one further 10-year period by re-recording a certified copy of the judgment before the existing lien expires, together with an affidavit giving the creditor's current address - the extension fails if that affidavit is not recorded at the same time. The extension cannot push the lien past the 20 years allowed by s. 55.081. | no judgment, order, or decree of any court shall be a lien upon real or personal property within the state after the expiration of 20 years from the date of the entry of such judgment, order, or decree | 55.081 |
| Minnesota | Ten years from entry. The judgment survives, and its lien on the debtor's real property in the county continues, for that period and no longer. | No renewal application. Minnesota's route is to sue on the judgment: an action upon a judgment must be begun within ten years after entry, and a creditor who brings that action in time and wins it holds a new judgment with its own ten years. Child support judgments are the exception - those are renewable under section 548.091. | The judgment survives, and the lien continues, for ten years after its entry. | 548.09 |
| New York | 20 years, running from the time the creditor was first entitled to enforce the judgment rather than from entry. At the end of it the judgment is conclusively presumed to have been paid and satisfied, and that presumption is displaced only by the debtor's own conduct - a written acknowledgment of the debt signed by the person to be charged, or a payment on it, which starts a fresh 20 years. Property taken by an enforcement order or by levy on an execution counts as a payment. The lien the judgment holds on the debtor's real property runs a shorter clock of its own. | New York gives the creditor nothing to file that extends the 20 years. What can be renewed is the lien. An action upon the judgment may be brought under CPLR 5014 once ten years have elapsed since the judgment was first docketed, and it may be commenced during the year before that ten years runs out - a one-year window. The judgment in that action is designated a renewal judgment and is docketed as one by the clerk, and its lien takes effect upon the expiration of ten years from the first docketing of the original judgment. CPLR 5203(a) is the section that gives the original lien its ten years, measured from the filing of the judgment-roll. | A money judgment is presumed to be paid and satisfied after the expiration of twenty years from the time when the party recovering it was first entitled to enforce it. | CVP § 211 |
| Ohio | Five years from the date of the judgment, or from the last renewal of it, whichever is later - for a judgment that is not in favour of the state. A judgment in favour of the state runs ten years from the judgment or any renewal, or fifteen years from the last execution on it, whichever is later. | Keeping it alive takes an enforcement step, not a filing. The five years reset each time the creditor issues an execution, issues and files a certificate of judgment, has an order of garnishment issued or continuing, or commences or continues a proceeding in aid of execution - the statute calls any of those a renewal of the judgment, and no application to the court is needed. If none of them happens in time the judgment is dormant, and it can then only be brought back by an action to revive it, which must be brought within ten years from the time it became dormant. | A judgment that is not in favor of the state is dormant and shall not operate as a lien against the estate of the judgment debtor unless one of the following occurs within five years from the date of the judgment or any renewal of the judgment, whichever is later | 2329.07 |
| Texas | 10 years from the date the judgment was rendered, if no writ of execution issues in that time - the judgment then becomes dormant automatically and execution may not issue on it. Issuing a writ inside the 10 years restarts the clock: a second writ may issue at any time within 10 years of the first, and the judgment only goes dormant if none does. Child support judgments are outside this section. | Nothing to file in advance, and a short window afterwards. Once the judgment is dormant it can be brought back only by a separate court proceeding - scire facias, or an action of debt - and that proceeding must be brought no later than the second anniversary of the date the judgment became dormant. Two years is the whole revival window, and missing it is final. | If a writ of execution is not issued within 10 years after the rendition of a judgment of a court of record or a justice court, the judgment is dormant and execution may not be issued on the judgment unless it is revived. | CIV PRAC & REM § 34.001 |
Where this came from
Every record above links the page it was taken from and quotes the sentence that states it. These are the 14 sources this dataset was assembled from.
- leginfo.legislature.ca.govhttps://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CCP§ionNum=683.020
- leginfo.legislature.ca.govhttps://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CCP§ionNum=683.120
- flsenate.govhttps://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2025/0055.081
- flsenate.govhttps://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2025/0055.10
- flsenate.govhttps://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2025/0095.11
- revisor.mn.govhttps://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/548.09
- revisor.mn.govhttps://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/541.04
- codes.findlaw.comhttps://codes.findlaw.com/ny/civil-practice-law-and-rules/cvp-sect-211/
- codes.findlaw.comhttps://codes.findlaw.com/ny/civil-practice-law-and-rules/cvp-sect-5014/
- codes.findlaw.comhttps://codes.findlaw.com/ny/civil-practice-law-and-rules/cvp-sect-5203/
- codes.ohio.govhttps://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2329.07
- codes.ohio.govhttps://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2325.18
- codes.findlaw.comhttps://codes.findlaw.com/tx/civil-practice-and-remedies-code/civ-prac-rem-sect-34-001/
- codes.findlaw.comhttps://codes.findlaw.com/tx/civil-practice-and-remedies-code/civ-prac-rem-sect-31-006/
Machine-readable
- data.jsonThe whole dataset — every record with its source URL and source quote.
- Open Knowledge Format bundleOne JSON object per line — every record's frontmatter and quoted span exactly as it is held here, in one fetch.
- How this is made and checkedWhat "verified against source" does and does not mean.
From your own code
Same records, same quotes, without scraping the page: refsource is on PyPI and npm. Each value comes back carrying the URL it was read from and the sentence on that page that states it — .source and .quote sit on the value itself rather than in a side channel, so the checking step is available instead of skipped.
pip install refsource
refsource lookup judgment-renewal-deadlines-by-state state=California
npx -y refsource lookup judgment-renewal-deadlines-by-state state=California