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For legal aid and advocates

If you advise people about payday loans, this site was built for the part of your job where you need the rule and the citation, fast, for a state that isn’t yours.

Take it. Use it. You do not need to ask.

Every state page here may be copied, adapted, printed and handed to a client by a legal aid office, a non-profit counselling agency, a clinic or a public library. No permission needed, no fee, no attribution required — though a link back helps us.

One request instead: where you reuse a figure, cite the underlying regulator or statute rather than us. Every figure on every page carries a marker linking to its source. The reader is better served landing on the law.

If you need a page in a different format — plain text, a one-page PDF for a waiting room, a version without our branding — email us and we will make it.

What is actually here

The things clients are least likely to know

These came out of verifying all 52 jurisdictions one at a time, and they are the reason this site exists rather than another state-by-state table.

Six states

An extended payment plan the client has to ask for

Florida, Washington, Utah, Idaho, Louisiana and Indiana all require lenders to offer one — usually at no extra charge. In most of them the right disappears once the loan is in default, so the timing of the conversation matters more than anything else.

0.71%Florida take-up, per the Legislature’s own analysis
7.86%Utah take-up, per the state regulator

The full breakdown, with how to ask in each state →

Federal — every state

A lender may not require repayment by recurring debit

12 CFR 1005.10(e)(1): no financial institution or other person may condition an extension of credit on repayment by preauthorized electronic fund transfer. The Bureau’s official interpretation states it plainly — creditors may not require repayment of loans by electronic means on a preauthorized, recurring basis.

Most clients arrive asking how to stop a debit. This is upstream of that question.

Regulation E, provision by provision →

Several states

The loan may be void, not merely unlawful

New York, Illinois, Nebraska, Connecticut, Arkansas, South Dakota and Hawaii each void a loan made in breach of their limits. Illinois and Nebraska remove the right to retain what has already been paid, not only to collect. Arkansas voids principal and interest, under its state constitution.

Each of those is on the relevant state page with the statutory language and a link.

Where the state prohibits payday lending

Rent-a-bank appeared only where the law said no

North Carolina’s Attorney General told the Senate Banking Committee that payday lenders used bank partnerships only in states that prohibited payday lending — and lent in their own names everywhere else. Georgia legislated against the structure in 2004, seventeen years before the current wave.

The full account, state by state →

If we have something wrong

Tell us. You read these statutes more closely than we do and you will find things. Email [email protected] with the provision and we will check it against the primary source, correct it, and publish the correction with a date on our corrections page.

Data

The underlying citation set — every jurisdiction, every provision, every source URL — is available as structured data. If it would be useful for your own tool, guide or intake process, ask.

Published by Resultex Media Group LLC. Not a lender, broker or lead generator. Nothing here is legal advice; you already knew that.