MCA Laws by State: Every State Compared

As of July 2026, 12 states in this guide have enacted commercial financing disclosure laws that reach merchant cash advances: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Georgia, Virginia, Missouri, Louisiana, Connecticut, Utah, Kansas, Vermont. Requirements differ — California, New York, Connecticut, and Vermont (effective 2027) require an APR or annualized-rate figure; the others require total-dollar-cost disclosures. Each state's page details what your funder owed you and who enforces it.

MCAs are structured as purchases of future receivables, which generally places them outside usury caps — but courts look at substance over form. Under the widely applied three-factor analysis (does the reconciliation provision actually work, is the term effectively finite, does the funder have recourse on bankruptcy), an MCA whose repayment is absolute rather than contingent can be recharacterized as a loan, with usury consequences that vary enormously by state — from none at all to voiding the entire obligation. Each state page covers the local doctrine.

A confession of judgment (COJ) is a clause where the merchant pre-agrees to entry of judgment without a lawsuit. Since New York barred COJs against out-of-state debtors in 2019, the picture is a patchwork: some states void the clauses outright, some permit them with formalities, a few remain live commercial forums — and in several states, out-of-state confessed judgments get enforced under full faith and credit despite a local ban. The table below shows every state's posture; the state pages carry the statutes and case law.

Every cell in the comparison links to a state guide where each claim carries a citation to the statute, court opinion, or official government source it rests on, verified as of July 15, 2026. Where no court decision could be verified for a state, the guide says so rather than citing secondhand claims — and several widely circulated errors (miscited statutes, nonexistent laws) are corrected on the relevant pages.