The figures sit in Schedule 2 to the Debtors (Scotland) Act 1987, as substituted with effect from 6 April 2025. They were still the live figures in August 2026.

Most pages stop at the three numbers. This one shows what happens a single pound above the line, how to check your employer moved to the current table, and why the threshold says nothing about how much they can take from your wages once you clear it.

Payroll compares your net pay for the period against the nil band in the table for your pay frequency, and leaves everything at or below it alone. Only the earnings above the threshold are exposed to a deduction.

Your employer has no discretion in any of this. Operating the schedule is a legal duty, which is why the mechanics of a wage arrestment are worth understanding before you ring payroll to complain.

The three protected figures, from 6 April 2025

Each figure belongs to one pay frequency and cannot be swapped for another.

Notice how small the entry deduction is. Weekly net pay of £173.00 produces £2.30, and daily net pay of £25.00 produces £0.33.

The protection is per pay period, not per year

Every pay date is assessed on its own. A month where net pay drops to £749.00 produces a nil deduction even if the month before produced £172.50.

The arrestment does not end because of that. It stays in force and picks up again the next time your net earnings rise above the threshold.

Which figure on your payslip is being tested

It is net pay, so income tax, National Insurance and pension contributions all come off before the threshold is applied. Your gross salary is never the number used.

The employer may also take £1.00 per deduction as an administration charge. That comes out of your pay on top of the arrested sum, and it does not reduce the debt.

You lose the whole nil band and land straight on the £10.00 minimum in band two. Monthly net pay of £750.00 produces nothing, and £751.00 produces £10.00.

This is the part nobody explains. Band two is not a flat 15% of the excess, it is 15% of the excess or £10.00, whichever is greater.

On £751.00 net, 15% of the £1.00 excess is £0.15. The minimum overrides it, so one extra pound of net pay costs you £10.00.

The just-above-the-threshold reckoner

Every figure below comes from the statutory monthly table in force from 6 April 2025. Read down to the net pay closest to yours.

The £10.00 floor keeps biting for longer than most people expect. It stays the greater figure all the way up to about £816.67 of monthly net pay, so £800.00 and £816.00 both produce £10.00.

Our wage arrestment calculator will confirm the figure for your own payslip.

Above that point the percentage takes over. At £817.00 the deduction becomes £10.05, and at £900.00 it is £22.50.

Why the first band is built this way

The minimum exists so a deduction is worth collecting. Without it, someone a few pounds over the line would have pennies taken every pay day.

The trade-off is a cliff edge at the threshold, which matters if your hours vary. The difference between £750.00 and £751.00 net is £10.00.

The cliff only exists at the bottom of the table. Above it the bands stack gently, so £1,000.00 net produces £37.50 rather than a percentage of the whole amount.

The current set came into force on 6 April 2025 and replaced a set of lower thresholds. No April 2026 uprating was made, so these are still the figures your employer should be using.

The change was made by the Diligence against Earnings (Variation) (Scotland) Regulations 2024, which substituted the whole of Schedule 2. Tables are typically reviewed every two to three years rather than annually.

What actually changed on 6 April 2025

The rewrite substituted the whole of Schedule 2. It lifted the protected figure for every one of the three pay frequencies.

The previous set was lower across all three pay frequencies, so more people were caught by it. Pages still showing four bands at 19% and 23% are quoting figures replaced on 6 April 2025 by SSI 2024/293.

How to check your employer moved to the new figures

If your arrestment started before April 2025, this is worth ten minutes. Payroll software usually updates itself, but a manually operated schedule sometimes does not.

• Take the net pay figure from a recent payslip, not the gross.
• Check that nothing at all was deducted where net pay was £750.00 or less in the month, £172.61 or less in the week.
• Compare the deduction shown against the current table for your pay frequency.
• Raise any mismatch with payroll in writing first, because they can correct it faster than anyone else.

An overpayment is a dispute about the operation of the arrestment rather than a complaint about the debt. It applies whichever name your employer uses for the deduction on the payslip.

No, and merging them is the most common mistake made here. A Scottish earnings arrestment uses a fixed cash nil band, while a CMS or DWP deduction works to a 60% floor instead.

Which one you are looking at depends on who is enforcing against you. Three separate rulebooks can produce a deduction on a Scottish payslip, and they protect very different things.

The three protected floors compared

The middle column is the promise each scheme makes. The right-hand column is what that promise is worth on a large payslip.

The 60% floor is a direct earnings attachment and deduction from earnings order concept, and it does not reach an earnings arrestment at all. The DWP sets out the arithmetic in its employer guide to direct earnings attachments.

Where other orders already take 40% or more of your net earnings, no direct earnings attachment is deducted in that period at all.

How to tell which one is on your payslip

A Scottish earnings arrestment produces a figure that matches a table, not a percentage of your whole net pay. A deduction shown as a flat percentage is usually a direct earnings attachment.

Payroll can confirm which schedule they hold and who served it. That answers the more useful question of why the arrestment was granted in the first place.

Only weekly, monthly and daily. There is no fortnightly table and no four-weekly table, so payroll either uses the daily table or applies the weekly table to each week in the period.

This catches out anyone paid every two or four weeks, though the protection is still there and is just assembled differently.

Fortnightly and four-weekly pay

Using the daily table means the protected figure is £24.66 multiplied by the number of days in the period. Using the weekly table per week means £172.61 for each week covered.

Employers follow their own payroll guidance on which method to apply. Ask which one was used if your deduction looks wrong.

The two usually land within pennies of each other. Daily net earnings of £40.00 produce £2.30, or £16.10 across seven days, against £16.11 from the weekly table on £280.00.

How the rounding works

The calculation is worked to two decimal places of a penny and then rounded to the nearest whole penny. An exact half penny rounds down rather than up.

That only matters when you are checking a deduction against your own arithmetic, where it tells you whether a one-penny gap is an error or just the rounding rule.

There is no hardship application against an earnings arrestment, and a sheriff cannot reduce a Schedule 2 deduction because you cannot afford it. Changing the outcome means changing or ending the arrestment itself.

The only review power over an earnings arrestment is s.50 of the Debtors (Scotland) Act 1987, and it never mentions affordability.

What section 50 does and does not give you

Section 50(1) lets you ask the sheriff to declare that the arrestment is invalid or has ceased to have effect. Section 50(3) lets you have a dispute about how it is being operated determined.

Neither has a time limit, and neither has a hardship or affordability ground. They fix a wrong deduction, not an unaffordable one.

The “unduly harsh” test people find online is a different provision entirely. Sections 73Q and 73R apply where an arrestment attaches funds, which means bank and third-party arrestments rather than wages.

Your employer cannot help either, however sympathetic they are. Refusing to operate the schedule makes them liable for the sums they should have deducted, which is why arguing with payroll or with the sheriff officer firm collecting it gets nowhere.

The routes that do work

A Time to Pay Order is applied for after decree and is competent against a summary warrant. Where the sheriff grants one, the sheriff must recall any existing earnings arrestment.

A Time to Pay Direction is a different thing and is not available on summary warrant debt, because a direction responds to a court action.

The debt has to be £25,000 or less excluding interest, and the test is what is reasonable in all the circumstances. The sheriff clerk at your local sheriff court or a money adviser can tell you whether an application is competent on your facts.

Once a Debt Payment Programme is approved under the Debt Arrangement Scheme, an existing earnings arrestment stops and creditors cannot start new diligence. It is run by the Accountant in Bankruptcy through the DAS Administrator.

A protected trust deed ends an earnings arrestment on the date of protection, under s.173 of the Bankruptcy (Scotland) Act 2016. Sequestration does the same on the date of sequestration, and Minimal Asset Process counts as sequestration for this purpose.

A statutory moratorium gives six months of protection and you get one per rolling 12 months. It stops service of a charge for payment, stops new diligence and stops creditor petitions for sequestration.

It does not stop a creditor obtaining a decree, and interest and charges keep accruing throughout.

Whether a creditor can carry on an arrestment already running is treated differently in the Accountant in Bankruptcy’s adviser guidance from the general rule, so ask a money adviser.

Money already deducted before any of those dates is credited against the debt rather than refunded. Check that with the creditor, because how long the arrestment has left to run depends on what the balance says after they apply it.

Where the debt is council tax

The threshold is identical, because the table does not care who the creditor is. Only the route out changes, and our council tax debt advice page covers what a council will and will not agree to.

The 10% surcharge added when the warrant was granted sits inside the balance being collected. That lengthens the run without changing a single figure in the table.