Judgment liens in Rhode Island

What to file, and where

The lien rides on the attachment and then on the execution, and the levy is the act that matters.

When final judgment goes for the plaintiff in a suit where a writ attaching real estate was served, R.I. Gen. Laws 9-25-23¹ provides that the execution issued on that judgment is to be levied on the attached property as soon as may be. So the attachment comes first, during the suit. A levy on the execution follows the win. One act puts a hold on the land, and the other act collects on it.

Attachments of real estate live in the records of land evidence, which R.I. Gen. Laws 10-5-44² says in passing when it entitles a clerk's six-year certificate to be recorded there wherever the attachment was filed. That section does not name which office keeps those records, or how an execution levy gets written down at all. Two different records, and these statutes name the office for only one of them.

What it reaches

Most of it is about what the lien does not reach: public agencies, and a large slice of a home.

No judgment against an agency is a charge or lien on its real property, and no execution issues against it, under R.I. Gen. Laws 45-31-23³. Its exceptions point to other chapters, and the definition of agency sits in a part of chapter 45-31 that is not set out here, so who counts as one is a question for the statute book rather than for this page.

A home is where the real limit sits. Under R.I. Gen. Laws 9-26-4.1(a)⁴, an estate of homestead protects $500,000 in the land and buildings, or in personal property used as a residence, for an owner or for someone who rightfully holds the premises by lease, as a life tenant, as a trust beneficiary or otherwise, and who occupies or means to occupy it as a principal residence. That estate is exempt from attachment, from levy on execution and from sale for debts or legacies, except in the cases the subsection lists.

And the estate is automatic. It arises by operation of law, with no declaration, no statement in a deed, no documentation at all, under R.I. Gen. Laws 9-26-4.1(a). A creditor searching the land records for a homestead filing in Rhode Island will find nothing, because there is nothing to file.

How long it lasts, and renewing it

Twenty years is the outer wall, and a string of shorter clocks can bring the attachment down long before that.

An execution levied against real estate and of record is discharged of record and no longer a lien 20 years after the date of judgment in the case the execution issued from, under R.I. Gen. Laws 9-26-33⁵. Watch the starting point. That clock runs from the judgment, not from the levy, so a creditor who levies late has already spent part of the term. One carve-out survives: a levy against only one spouse in real estate held as tenants by the entirety.

An attachment has its own 20-year wall, running from the date the attachment was recorded, per R.I. Gen. Laws 10-5-46⁶. Before that wall, three shorter clocks can cut it short. An attachment dies if the complaint is not filed with the court before, or within 30 days after, the attachment is made, per R.I. Gen. Laws 10-5-45⁷. For an attachment filed after May 5, 1955, where no decision has been entered, the lien dissolves whenever the cause sits without action for six years, as the court docket shows, under R.I. Gen. Laws 10-5-44. And the attached property is discharged if execution is not levied within one year from entry of judgment, with stayed time not counted, under R.I. Gen. Laws 9-25-23.

How a Rhode Island judgment lien is extended or revived is a question the sections here do not reach. They set the clocks and the acts that stop them early. They do not describe a way to add time to the far end, and this page will not invent one. Across states the renewal question splits sharply, which a separate page on duration and renewal lays out.

Land in another county

This is the plainest hole in what the sections here answer.

The statutes that govern this speak of an attachment filed in the records of land evidence and of an execution levied of record. They do not say how a Rhode Island lien reaches real property in a town or county other than where the suit sits. The question is a real one, and no section here settles it. This page will not guess at the answer.

Homestead here, in one paragraph

The $500,000 estate is strong and automatic, and the list of things it does not stop is long.

That exemption yields to a run of specific claims under R.I. Gen. Laws 9-26-4.1(a)(1) to (7): sale for taxes, sewer and water liens, lighting and fire district assessments; a debt contracted before the estate was acquired; a debt for the purchase of the home; a family court support order for a spouse or minor children; a levy for ground rent where the building stands on land the owner does not own; a debt to the department of human services or the state for reimbursement of medical assistance; and a debt owing to a federally insured deposit-taking institution or a person regulated or licensed under title 19. A homestead also does not apply to a debt owing to a regulated institution, a debt secured by a mortgage or other voluntary lien, or a mechanics' lien under chapter 28 of title 34, per R.I. Gen. Laws 9-26-4.1(b).

Mortgages sit on their own rung. Under R.I. Gen. Laws 9-26-4.1(c), a homestead is subordinate to a mortgage signed by all the owners when it was executed; a mortgage signed by fewer than all owners is superior only to the homestead estate of the owners who signed it, along with their non-titled spouses and minor children. So the signatures on the mortgage decide whose protection gets defeated.

One family, one home. Under R.I. Gen. Laws 9-26-4.1(b), only one individual may acquire a homestead estate for the benefit of a family, and that estate may be acquired on only one principal residence. How Rhode Island's $500,000 lines up against other states is on the homestead comparison page.

Where the records live

The statutes here name one record office and leave the other unstated.

Attachments of real estate are filed in the records of land evidence, and R.I. Gen. Laws 10-5-44 is where a six-year certificate from the court clerk gets recorded. An execution levy, by contrast, is the act that collects once judgment is for the plaintiff and a writ attached the land, per R.I. Gen. Laws 9-25-23. Which office keeps the record of that levy, these sections do not say.

For the shape of how a judgment becomes a lien in other states, the fifty-state overview sets Rhode Island's attachment-and-execution route beside the recording and docketing routes elsewhere. Where to record a levy against land in a particular Rhode Island town is a question for counsel with the file open.