Nearly one in 13 Colorado workers has their wages garnished, a rate slightly higher than the national average, a new study shows.

And although child-support payments make up the largest share of garnishments across the country, Coloradans more often have their pay seized to cover student loans and personal consumer debts, such as those racked up by credit cards, the study by ADP Research Institute found.

Nationwide, about 7.2 percent of paychecks are garnished, compared with about 7.5 percent in Colorado.

Child-support garnishments in Colorado were actually half as frequent as those for loans and other types of personal debt, the ADP analysis of 13 million employee records in 2013 found.

That Colorado bucks the national trend has some experts puzzled.

“At first I thought it might be that Colorado has a higher percentage of credit-card delinquencies and charge-offs,” said Ben Woolsey, president and general manager of CreditCardForum.com, which analyzes national credit card data. “But it wasn’t. Colorado isn’t even in the top 10.”

Also of note: ADP found that the most frequently garnished paychecks are in white-collar professions, the opposite of the national trend.

Nationally, 10.2 percent of companies with employee-wage garnishments were in the manufacturing sector, while 5.4 percent were in white-collar firms.

In Colorado, blue-collar companies had 5.2 percent of the total number of garnishments while white-collar businesses accounted for 7.5 percent of them, ADP’s study found.

State employee statistics appear to bear out at least one part of the trend, with 1,208 active garnishments, most for something other than child support, according to the state controller’s office. Because one employee could have more than one garnishment, it’s unclear how many of the state’s 33,000 employees are affected.

Denver payroll records, however, reflect neither piece of ADPs findings: 485 city employees have their wages garnished, according to its Department of Finance, or 3.8 percent of the total city payroll of 12,905 workers.

And a majority of those — 262 — are garnishments for child-support payments.

“It’s really hard to draw any single conclusion from the variables here,” said Whitney Traylor, a Denver attorney who teaches business and employment law at Metropolitan State University of Denver. “Perhaps it has more to do with the escalating housing market, with people pressing to pay their rent or mortgage before credit cards.”

Some say it’s possible more Coloradans are forced to pay credit-card debts that typically disappear in bankruptcy court because income levels are higher and, as a result, bankruptcy is less an option.

“If you have $8,000 in consumer debt, you’d not file bankruptcy, which is where you handle significant debt,” Traylor said. “I know a number of bankruptcy attorneys who would turn someone away, saying the amount of debt doesn’t justify it.”

That Colorado is different could be explained by the lower number of personal bankruptcies filed here, according to Corrinne Flores, garnishment agency liaison for ADP.

“The volume of Colorado bankruptcies are lower than the national level, and that could be that consumers there are working out payment plans,” Flores said. “And as more people are going back into the workforce, they are trying to pay those debts.”

The number of personal bankruptcy filings in Denver, home to the federal 10th Circuit, was fourth-lowest in 2014 among the nation’s 12 regional courts, according to federal statistics.

Of the 52,295 personal bankruptcy filings in the 10th Circuit that year, Coloradans were responsible for 17,157 of them, statistics show. The 10th Circuit also includes Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming.

It also could be that as the economy improves, consumers are spurred to spend but retain some of the bad habits from before the economic collapse, Woolsey said.

“Credit has loosened up quite a bit over the last few years, with banks giving more credit than they had been and people leveraged up as the economy improved,” he said. “Some of those debts are sold to collection companies, which are very aggressive. This all suggests the economy isn’t as solid as it might appear.”

David Migoya: 303-954-1506, dmigoya@ denverpost.com or twitter.com/davidmigoya