Homestead Exemption by State — Explainer

Matrix explainer. Coverage: how much home equity a judgment creditor can reach. Source matrix: homestead-exemption-by-state. 51 jurisdictions. Not legal advice.

Short answer

Every state protects some home equity from an ordinary money judgment except four: Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania have no general homestead exemption at all. Among the other 47, states split into six structurally different models — a fixed dollar cap, an acreage cap with no dollar limit, both caps at once, a formula that moves with inflation or local home prices, or (DC only) no cap of either kind. The dollar figures span two orders of magnitude: $5,000 in Kentucky and West Virginia versus $605,000 in Nevada, before you even get to the states with no cap at all. Popular LLC formation states are not necessarily good asset-protection states on this axis — Delaware has zero homestead protection, and Nevada's high dollar cap has nothing to do with where an LLC is formed.

Six structural models, and how many states use each

• Fixed dollar cap, no acreage limit (30 states) — the most common model. The figure alone ranges from $5,000 (Kentucky, West Virginia) to $605,000 (Nevada).
• Hybrid — dollar cap AND acreage cap, both must hold (7 states) — Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska. A home has to clear both the value ceiling and the size ceiling to get full protection.
• Acreage cap only, no dollar limit (6 states) — Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas. A modest home on a qualifying lot is fully protected regardless of its value.
• Dynamic formula (3 states) — California, Montana, Washington. The cap moves on its own: California is the greater of a $300,000 floor or the countywide median home price up to $600,000, both CPI-adjusted since 2022; Montana's $350,000 2021 base rises 4% a year; Washington is the greater of $125,000 or the county's prior-year median sale price. None of these produce a single current-year number a primary source confirms — this matrix reports the formula and its floor.
• Unlimited — no cap of any kind (1 state) — DC. Every neighboring exemption in the same statutory list is dollar-capped; the homestead paragraph is the one exception.
• No general exemption (4 states) — Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania. Confirmed absences, not gaps: each state's full exemption statute was read end to end.

The exemption isn't always what the secondary sources say it is

Building this matrix meant reading the primary statute for all 51 jurisdictions, and the secondary sources — blog posts, exemption round-ups, even other legal sites — turned out to be wrong often enough to be worth naming directly:

• New Jersey is commonly cited as having a "$340,000 homestead exemption under N.J.S. 2A:17-19." That statute is real, but it's a $1,000 general personal-property exemption with no real-property content at all — New Jersey has no general homestead exemption, state or bankruptcy-specific (a narrow 2026 exception for veterans and military spouses is covered below).

A second finding is about timing rather than accuracy: Missouri's current exemption is $15,000, but a change to $40,000 is already enacted and takes effect January 1, 2027. Reporting $40,000 today would be reporting law that isn't in force yet — the matrix carries the currently-operative figure and flags the pending change.

Two figures a snapshot of the statute alone would have gotten wrong

This matrix's first pass got New York and Ohio wrong in the opposite direction from the New Jersey catch above — not by trusting a fabricated secondary-source number, but by reading the codified statute text, correctly finding no adjustment clause inside it, and stopping there:

• New York's $150,000 / $125,000 / $75,000 three-tier structure (CPLR 5206) is real and has been textually unchanged since 2010 — but a companion provision (CPLR 5253) requires the Department of Financial Services to publish a triennial CPI adjustment to those exact tiers. The currently-controlling figures (effective April 1, 2024; next adjustment April 1, 2027) are $204,825 / $170,700 / $102,400 — confirmed directly against DFS's own published table, which shows all six adjustment cycles back to 2009.
• Ohio's codified $125,000 figure (Rev. Code 2329.66(A)(1)) hasn't changed since 2013, and a 2025 law (HB 96) really did take effect that year — but it never touched this figure; a word-for-word diff of the statute before and after HB 96 confirms the text is identical. Ohio's triennial CPI adjustment (Subsection (B)) is administered separately by the Ohio Judicial Conference and published in the Register of Ohio — it's never folded back into the codified section, so the statute reads $125,000 regardless of the current figure. The currently-controlling amount (effective April 1, 2025 through March 31, 2028) is $182,625.

The lesson generalizes: a dollar figure with no adjustment clause in the section you read is not the same as a figure with no adjustment mechanism anywhere in state law. Both matrix cells now cite the administering agency's published table directly, not just the codified section.

Where the exemption goes up — and what triggers it

A handful of states raise the base figure for specific claimants rather than raising it for everyone: Alabama and Hawaii add an elevated tier for age 62+ (Alabama) or head-of-family/65+ (Hawaii); Colorado doubles its base from $250,000 to $350,000 for an elderly or disabled owner. Massachusetts works differently — its $125,000 exemption is automatic with no filing, but an owner who affirmatively records a declared homestead at the registry of deeds gets $1,000,000 instead. Louisiana and New Hampshire both waive their dollar cap entirely — full value protected — for debts tied to a catastrophic or terminal medical condition, a carve-out not seen anywhere else in the matrix. New Jersey — one of the four states with no general homestead exemption — created the newest population-scoped exception in the matrix: a 2026 law protects a veteran, service member, or military spouse's primary and secondary residence with no dollar limit at all, once ownership is recorded with the county clerk. It doesn't change New Jersey's general-population answer, but it's a real, unlimited-value exception layered on top of "none."

The recurring wrong-topic trap

Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia each have a separate, unrelated property-tax homestead program that surfaces early in a search and is easy to mistake for the creditor-exemption statute this matrix tracks. They are different laws with different purposes — a property-tax homestead reduces your assessed value for tax billing; the exemption in this matrix protects equity from a money judgment. Every row was checked against its actual creditor-exemption statute, not the tax program.

What the matrix does not prove

• Figures are point-in-time. States amend these statutes — Illinois tripled its figure effective January 2026; several states run CPI or formula adjustments on a schedule. Each row's last_checked date marks when the statute was read, and formula states are flagged rather than given a guessed current number.
• The exemption applies to your primary residence, not investment property. Every statute in this matrix scopes to an owner-occupied dwelling. Rental property, vacation homes, and property held in an LLC or trust are governed by different rules entirely.
• State exemption vs. federal bankruptcy exemption is a real choice in some states. A minority of states let a debtor elect the federal bankruptcy exemption scheme instead of the state figure. This matrix records state law only.
• An unlimited or high-value exemption is not immune to fraud findings. Every state's exemption can still be challenged if the debtor moved assets into the homestead specifically to defeat a known creditor. This matrix records the statutory protection level, not case-by-case fraudulent-conveyance outcomes.

See also: Homestead Exemption by State (matrix) · LLC Charging Order Protection by State — Explainer · Domestic Asset Protection Trust States — Explainer