The collector calls, asks for you by name, and tells you your husband’s hospital bill or your wife’s credit card is “a household debt” you’re responsible for. Nice phrase. In Minnesota, the answer is no. Since October 1, 2024, the statute that governs private creditors says so without an exception of its own.
Here’s the whole rule:
(a) A spouse is not liable to a creditor for any debts of the other spouse. Notwithstanding this paragraph, in a proceeding under chapter 518 the court may apportion such debt between the spouses.
— Minn. Stat. § 519.05(a)
So why do people still lose money over a spouse’s debt? Because “not liable” is a rule about you, personally. It doesn’t protect money sitting in an account with both your names on it. It doesn’t undo anything you signed. And it doesn’t stop the debt from following your spouse’s estate. That’s the trouble.
Am I on the hook for my spouse’s medical bills or household debts?
Not anymore. Before October 1, 2024, § 519.05(a) carried one more sentence:
Where husband and wife are living together, they shall be jointly and severally liable for necessary medical services that have been furnished to either spouse, including any claims arising under section 246.53, 256B.15, 256D.16, or 261.04, and necessary household articles and supplies furnished to and used by the family.
— 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 114, art. 3, § 83 (deleted text)
The Legislature struck it in the 2024 Debt Fairness Act, and the session law says “This section is effective October 1, 2024.” Id.
It usually gets called a medical-bill fix, and I wrote about the medical-debt side of the act at /news/minnesota-medical-debt-fairness-act/. Reread the deleted sentence, though. It also made spouses liable for “necessary household articles and supplies furnished to and used by the family.” That’s gone too. One carve-out survives outside § 519.05: if your spouse is on Medical Assistance, Minn. Stat. § 256B.14 still treats you as a “responsible relative” who can be required to contribute toward the cost. The statutory necessaries rule in Minnesota is gone, start to finish.
And even the old rule was narrower than collectors made it sound. It applied only “[w]here husband and wife are living together,” and only to necessary medical services and necessary household goods. The Court of Appeals put the default plainly in 2014: “Generally, a spouse is not liable to a creditor for the other spouse’s debts.” Rooney v. Sanvik, 850 N.W.2d 732, 736 (Minn. Ct. App. 2014).
What’s left is contract. If you signed, as a co-borrower, a guarantor, a joint cardholder, or the “responsible party” on an admission form, you’re liable because you signed. That’s the fine print, and § 519.05 doesn’t touch it.
What about a bill from before October 1, 2024?
That’s the open question, and it’s where I’d expect a collector to dig in.
Minnesota has a rule of construction that cuts against you here: “No law shall be construed to be retroactive unless clearly and manifestly so intended by the legislature.” Minn. Stat. § 645.21. The 2024 act’s effective-date clause gives a date and nothing else. The Legislature could have said whether the change reaches old bills. It didn’t. And the Court of Appeals has already refused to run an earlier amendment to this same section backward. When the 2009 Legislature added the medical-assistance claims to § 519.05(a), the court said “[t]his amendment is not applicable to this case because it is not retroactive and only became effective on August 1, 2009, well after the deaths of the Perrins in 2004 and 2006.” In re Estate of Perrin, 796 N.W.2d 175, 179 n.1 (Minn. Ct. App. 2011).
So a collector suing the non-patient spouse over a 2023 hospital bill will argue the old sentence still governs. That’s my read on where the fight lands. I couldn’t find a Minnesota appellate decision deciding whether the 2024 deletion reaches services furnished before October 1, 2024. I searched CourtListener’s Minnesota collections three ways.
The tail is long. A consumer-debt action gets six years in Minnesota. Minn. Stat. § 541.053. A bill from September 2024 could be sued on into 2030. Even then, the old sentence reached only spouses “living together,” and only “necessary” medical services and household goods. The old rule comes with its old limits.
Why does the collector keep calling me, then?
Because federal law lets it. Under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act’s communication rules, “the term ‘consumer’ includes the consumer’s spouse”. 15 U.S.C. § 1692c(d). Regulation F says the same thing. 12 C.F.R. § 1006.6(a)(1). A collector can talk to you about your spouse’s debt without breaking the third-party-contact rule.
Calling you is one thing. Telling you that you owe it is another. The act prohibits “[t]he false representation of— (A) the character, amount, or legal status of any debt”. 15 U.S.C. § 1692e(2)(A). A collector that tells a Minnesota spouse she’s personally liable for her husband’s post-October 2024 debt, when she never signed for it, is describing a legal status that § 519.05(a) says doesn’t exist.
Can a creditor take money out of our joint account?
Yes. And almost nobody sees this one coming.
The Minnesota Supreme Court answered it head-on in Savig v. First National Bank of Omaha, decided in April 2010: “a judgment creditor may serve a garnishment summons on a garnishee, attaching funds in a joint account to satisfy the debt of an account holder, even though not all of the account holders are judgment debtors.” 781 N.W.2d 335, 341 (Minn. 2010).
Then it decided who has to prove whose money it is. You do:
[A] judgment debtor is initially, but rebuttably, presumed to own all of the funds in a joint account, and if the presumption is not rebutted, all of the funds in the account are subject to garnishment.
— Savig, 781 N.W.2d at 348
You can beat the presumption. The account holder “may rebut that presumption upon a preponderance of evidence of ownership.” Id. at 345. And the ownership rule you’d be proving is in § 524.6-203(a): “A joint account belongs, during the lifetime of all parties, to the parties in proportion to the net contributions by each to the sums on deposit, unless there is clear and convincing evidence of a different intent.” Net contribution means your deposits, less your withdrawals that weren’t paid to or used for the other party, plus a share of the interest. § 524.6-201, subd. 6. If every dollar in the account was yours, the creditor needs “clear and convincing evidence that the depositor intended to confer ownership of the funds on the debtor.” Enright v. Lehmann, 735 N.W.2d 326, 331 (Minn. 2007). In Enright, the money was the debtor’s wife’s.
This next part surprised me. The uniform law Minnesota’s statute came from was amended in 1989 to presume that married joint account holders own equal shares. The Minnesota bar committee that studied the changes didn’t recommend that language, and the Legislature didn’t adopt it. Savig, 781 N.W.2d at 348. So being married to the debtor gets you no head start. None. You prove your contributions, with records, or the account is presumed to be theirs.
And the clock is short. When a bank account is garnished, the bank mails the exemption forms to “the debtor”, and “[i]f no claim of exemption is received by the financial institution within 14 days after the exemption notices are mailed to the debtor, the funds remain subject to the garnishment summons.” Minn. Stat. § 571.913. Look who gets the mail. If you’re the spouse who isn’t the debtor, nobody’s required by that section to send you anything, so the 14 days can run without a word to you. The exemptions themselves are a separate subject, and I covered them at /news/minnesota-garnishment-exemptions-judgment/.
If your paycheck lands in a joint account with a spouse who has judgments against them, the burden’s on you, and the records you’d need are the ones you keep before the garnishment hits.
Does a divorce decree get me off a joint debt?
It decides who pays whom. It doesn’t decide who the creditor can sue.
Reread § 519.05(a)’s second sentence: “in a proceeding under chapter 518 the court may apportion such debt between the spouses.” Between the spouses. The creditor isn’t in that sentence. It didn’t get divorced. If both of you signed for the card or the car loan, the decree splits the responsibility between you. Nothing in § 519.05(a) takes your name off the contract.
Two things to know while the marriage is still intact. Either spouse can shut down a joint card alone: “Either spouse may close a credit card account or other unsecured consumer line of credit on which both spouses are contractually liable, by giving written notice to the creditor.” § 519.05(b). And here’s the irony. The one bill of your spouse’s a Minnesota court may well make you pay is their divorce lawyer. In a chapter 518 proceeding, the court “shall award attorney fees, costs, and disbursements in an amount necessary to enable a party to carry on or contest the proceeding,” if it finds the fees necessary for the good-faith assertion of the party’s rights and not an unnecessary addition to the proceeding’s length and expense, that the paying party “has the means to pay them”, and that the other party “does not have the means to pay them.” Minn. Stat. § 518.14, subd. 1(1)–(3).
Real estate titled in one spouse’s name has its own creditor rule during a divorce, which I covered at /news/minnesota-marital-vs-nonmarital-property/.
What happens to my spouse’s debts when they die?
The debts go to the estate, and the estate pays them before anybody inherits. The 2024 act said so expressly: “Nothing in this section prevents a creditor’s claim against a decedent’s estate.” § 519.05(c). Your personal liability doesn’t change because your spouse died.
Two places the estate’s creditors can still reach things you end up holding:
Joint and POD accounts. A multiple-party account isn’t effective against the estate “to transfer to a survivor sums needed to pay debts, taxes, and expenses of administration,” if the estate’s other assets are insufficient, “to the extent the deceased party is the source of the funds or beneficial owner.” Minn. Stat. § 524.6-207. The survivor can be made to account for the decedent’s share, but the personal representative can’t sue for it without a written demand from a surviving spouse, a creditor, or someone acting for a minor dependent child, and no proceeding can start more than two years after the death. Id. I walked through how that works at /news/minnesota-pod-and-joint-accounts/.
The house, usually not. When the homestead passes to the surviving spouse or the decedent’s descendants, “it is exempt from all debts which were not valid charges on it at the time of decedent’s death”. Minn. Stat. § 524.2-402(c). There are two named exceptions: claims “for state hospital care” under § 246.53 and “for medical assistance benefits” under § 256B.15. Id. A mortgage or other lien that was already on the house stays on it. The decedent’s unsecured credit cards don’t get to follow the house to you.
The signature everybody forgets
If the two of you filed a joint return, you signed for the tax. Federally, “if a joint return is made, the tax shall be computed on the aggregate income and the liability with respect to the tax shall be joint and several.” 26 U.S.C. § 6013(d)(3). Minnesota’s rule is the same: “If a joint income tax return is made by spouses, the liability for the tax is joint and several.” Minn. Stat. § 289A.31, subd. 2(a).
Minnesota adds two outs. A spouse who gets federal innocent-spouse relief under § 6015(b) or (f) of the Internal Revenue Code “is relieved of the state income tax liability on the underpayment.” Id. And after a divorce, a legal separation, or a spouse’s death, each person’s liability on a joint Minnesota return can be limited to “that person’s proportion of the total tax due if each spouse filed separate returns for the taxable year.” § 289A.31, subd. 2(b). That limit “is effective only when the commissioner receives written notice” of the divorce, separation, or death, and no refund can be claimed “for any taxes paid more than 60 days before receipt by the commissioner of the written notice.” Id. If you qualify and you haven’t sent that notice, every month you wait is money you may not get back.
And if your name is on a debt because your spouse or partner forced you onto it or forged it, that’s a different statute with its own limits. I covered it at /news/minnesota-coerced-debt-332-71/.
Minnesota stopped making you pay your spouse’s creditors in 2024. It never stopped presuming that a joint account belongs to whichever one of you the creditor is chasing.
Madgett Law, LLC
If a collector is telling you that your spouse’s bill is yours, or a creditor has garnished a joint account, call me. Madgett Law, LLC defends Minnesota consumers in debt collection actions, brings FDCPA claims against collectors who misstate what a consumer owes, and handles garnishment and exemption fights. More on the consumer and contract disputes we handle is on our general litigation page. Call 612-470-6529 or send us a message.
Sources: Minn. Stat. § 519.05(a) (no liability for the other spouse’s debts; apportionment between spouses in a chapter 518 proceeding), (b) (either spouse may close a jointly held credit card or unsecured consumer line by written notice), (c) (creditor’s claim against a decedent’s estate preserved); 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 114, art. 3, § 83 (deleting the living-together necessaries sentence; effective October 1, 2024); Minn. Stat. § 645.21 (presumption against retroactive effect); § 541.053 (six-year limit on consumer-debt actions); § 524.6-201, subd. 6 (net contribution); § 524.6-203(a) (joint account belongs to parties in proportion to net contributions); § 524.6-207 (multiple-party accounts and the decedent’s creditors; written demand; two years); § 571.913 (exemption notices served on the debtor; 14 days); § 518.14, subd. 1 (need-based attorney fees in a chapter 518 proceeding); § 524.2-402(c) (homestead passing to spouse or descendants exempt from debts not valid charges at death, except §§ 246.53 and 256B.15 claims); § 289A.31, subd. 2(a)–(b) (joint and several liability on a joint Minnesota return; § 6015 relief carries over; proportional limit after dissolution, separation, or death on written notice; 60-day refund limit). 15 U.S.C. § 1692c(d) (“consumer” includes spouse for communication rules); § 1692e(2)(A) (false representation of a debt’s legal status); 12 C.F.R. § 1006.6(a)(1); 26 U.S.C. § 6013(d)(3) (joint and several liability on a joint federal return). Savig v. First Nat’l Bank of Omaha, 781 N.W.2d 335, 341, 345, 348 (Minn. 2010); Enright v. Lehmann, 735 N.W.2d 326, 331 (Minn. 2007); In re Estate of Perrin, 796 N.W.2d 175, 179 n.1 (Minn. Ct. App. 2011); Rooney v. Sanvik, 850 N.W.2d 732, 736 (Minn. Ct. App. 2014); Minn. Stat. § 256B.14, subd. 1 (spouse of a medical assistance recipient as “responsible relative”), subd. 2 (contribution).
This article is general legal information about Minnesota law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship. Whether you’re liable on a particular debt, and whether a particular account or asset can be reached, depends on what you signed, how the account or property is titled, and the dates, and nothing here should be used to evaluate a specific debt. No outcome is promised or implied.