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How Many Pay Periods Are in a Year?

Weekly is 52, biweekly is 26 or 27, semimonthly is 24, monthly is 12. Why one of those numbers moves, what it costs you, and how to choose a schedule.

Nick Anisimov

Nick Anisimov

FirstHR Founder

Payroll
22 min

How Many Pay Periods Are in a Year?

Fifty-two, twenty-six, twenty-four, or twelve. Except one of those is sometimes twenty-seven, and that one costs you almost four percent of payroll

You are here for a number, so here it is: 52 if you pay weekly, 26 if you pay biweekly, 24 if you pay semimonthly, 12 if you pay monthly.

Three of those are true forever. One of them is a lie roughly once every eleven years, and it happens to be the one most American businesses use. A biweekly year is not always 26 paychecks. Sometimes it is 27, the extra one arrives in December, and it costs you 3.85 percent of your entire payroll in a year you did not budget for it.

And whether it happens to you does not depend on the year. It depends on the date of your first payday, which means two businesses on the same schedule can get different answers. So this gives you the number, and then explains the one that moves, what it costs, why the obvious fix is illegal mid-year, and how to actually choose a schedule when you have hourly staff. I build FirstHR, which is where the employee records that drive payroll live. This is general information rather than legal advice.

TL;DR
Weekly: 52. Biweekly: 26, sometimes 27. Semimonthly: 24. Monthly: 12. Biweekly is the only one that moves, because 26 periods cover 364 days and a year is 365, so the gap accumulates until an extra paycheck appears every eleven or twelve years. That extra cheque costs 3.85 percent of payroll. Whether it hits you depends on your first payday of the year, so count your own calendar. The obvious fix, dividing salary by 27, only works if you decide before the year starts, and it can knock a lower-paid exempt employee below the salary threshold and cost them their exemption.

The Answer

Four schedules, four numbers.

The answer, in one table
Weekly52Every seven days, same day each week. The most administrative work and the schedule hourly workers prefer
Biweekly26, sometimes 27Every fourteen days, same day of the week. The most common schedule in the country, and the only one that can surprise you
Semimonthly24, alwaysTwice a month on fixed dates, such as the 15th and the last day. Never varies, and it fights with overtime
Monthly12Once a month. Cheapest to run and hardest on anybody living paycheck to paycheck. Illegal for some workers in some states
Three of those numbers are fixed forever. One of them is not, and the one that is not is the one most employers use. That is the entire story, and it is the part almost nobody checks.

Biweekly is by far the most common, and it is the one with the asterisk. That combination is the reason this question gets asked as often as it does.

Pay Period, Pay Date, Pay Cycle

Three terms, one of which is genuinely different from the other two.

Definition
Pay Period
A pay period is the recurring span of time over which an employee's work is measured for the purpose of paying them: a week, two weeks, half a month, or a month. It is distinct from the pay date, which is the day the money actually arrives and which falls after the pay period ends, because employers pay in arrears for work already performed. Pay cycle is used interchangeably with pay period in ordinary speech. The number of pay periods in a year is determined by the frequency: 52 weekly, 26 or occasionally 27 biweekly, 24 semimonthly, and 12 monthly.

The pay period is the work. The pay date is the money. They are different dates, the gap between them is the arrears, and an employee who receives a stub on the 23rd covering work from the 5th to the 18th is looking at exactly what they should be. The mechanics of that gap are covered in the guide to arrears.

Pay cycle, in most sentences, just means pay period. Nobody will misunderstand you.

Why Biweekly Is Sometimes 27

This is the part worth understanding properly, because the arithmetic is simple and the consequence is not.

Why a 27th paycheck appears out of nowhere
A biweekly period covers14 days
Two weeks. No ambiguity
Twenty-six of them cover364 days
26 times 14. And a year is 365 days, or 366 in a leap year
Which leaves, every year1 or 2 days uncovered
A tiny gap. Invisible. Nobody notices, and the payroll runs fine
After eleven or twelve yearsThe gap reaches 14 days
And fourteen days is a full pay period. So one arrives, unannounced, in a year nobody planned for
A calendar year is actually26.07 pay periods
Not 26. The extra .07 is the thing that accumulates, and it has been accumulating since the last time this happened
Here is the uncomfortable implication of that last row. If you have been dividing salaries by 26 all along, you have been very slightly overpaying every year, and the 27th paycheck is the bill for that arriving all at once.

Read the last row once more. A year is not 26 biweekly pay periods. It is 26.07.

Which means that if you have been dividing annual salaries by 26 and paying that amount 26 times, you have been paying slightly less than a full year of work, every year, for years, and nobody noticed because the gap is a day. The 27th paycheck is not an anomaly. It is the correction.

It Depends on Your Payday, Not on the Year
This is the single most misunderstood point in the whole topic, and it is why generic articles about it are dangerous. Whether you get 27 paydays depends on the date of your first payday, not on some property of the calendar year in general. Two businesses both paying biweekly, one whose first payday is January 2 and one whose first payday is January 9, can have different numbers of paydays in the same year. Which means the only way to know is to count your own. Take your first payday, add fourteen days repeatedly, and see how many land before December 31. Do not trust an article. Trust your calendar.

What the Extra Paycheck Actually Costs

The arithmetic, on a salary most small businesses would recognize.

What the extra paycheck actually costs
Salary$52,000
The number in the offer letter
Divided by 26, the usual way$2,000 per paycheck
What you have been paying, and what your payroll system is configured to pay
In a 27-paycheck year, at $2,000$54,000 paid out
Twenty-seven times two thousand. Two thousand dollars more than the salary you agreed
Which is, per employee3.85 percent over budget
27 divided by 26. Small as a percentage, and it is your entire payroll, and it is a number nobody put in the plan
The alternative: divide by 27$1,925.93 per paycheck
Same annual total, smaller cheques. And this option has a legal problem, which is the next section
Now multiply the last-but-one row by your headcount. On a team of twenty, 3.85 percent of payroll is not a rounding error. It is a hire you did not make, and it is arriving in December whether or not you budgeted for it.

The number to hold onto is 3.85 percent. That is 27 divided by 26, and it is what your payroll costs go up by in a 27-paycheck year if you change nothing.

On a team of twenty averaging $60,000, that is roughly $46,000 of unbudgeted payroll expense arriving in a single quarter. It is not a rounding error and it is not a surprise you can absorb quietly.

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You Cannot Fix It Mid-Year

Which brings us to the section that most articles about this leave out entirely, and which matters enormously if you are reading this in July rather than in November.

If the year has already started, you cannot fix this by dividing by 27
The obvious solution to a 27-paycheck year is to divide the salary by 27 instead of 26. That works, and it works only if you decide it before the year begins.Mid-year, it collides with the FLSA salary basis rule. An exempt employee must receive their full predetermined salary for any workweek in which they perform any work. You cannot retroactively shrink a paycheck they have already earned to balance the annual total.And you certainly cannot skip the 27th paycheck on the theory that they have already been paid their annual salary. They worked the period. The period gets paid.
If you are reading this in the middle of a 27-paycheck year and you did not plan for it, the safe answer is usually to absorb the extra cheque and adjust prospectively for the next time. Which is roughly eleven years away, so write it down somewhere you will find it.

The FLSA salary basis rule is the obstacle. An exempt employee must receive their full predetermined salary for any workweek in which they perform work, and it cannot be reduced because of variations in the quantity or quality of the work.

So the two tempting mid-year moves are both off the table. You cannot retroactively shrink the cheques they have already earned to make the annual total come out right. And you cannot skip the 27th payday on the grounds that they have already received their annual salary, because they worked that period, and worked periods get paid.

Which leaves absorbing the cost. Unsatisfying, expensive, and correct. Then write down the date of the next one, because it is eleven or twelve years away and nobody will remember.

The Trap Inside the Fix

Even when you do plan ahead and divide by 27, there is a second problem, and it is the one that turns a budget question into a legal one.

The trap inside the fix
Federal salary threshold for exemption$684 per week
An exempt employee must be paid at least this, on a salary basis, to keep the exemption. Some states set a higher figure
A $36,000 salary, divided by 26$692.31 per week
Just above the line. Comfortably exempt, and nobody has ever thought about it
The same salary, divided by 27$666.67 per week
Below the federal threshold. And now the exemption is in question
Which meansThey may be owed overtime
Fail the salary basis test and the person is non-exempt, and every hour over forty they worked this year is unpaid overtime
This is what makes the 27th pay period genuinely dangerous rather than merely expensive. The sensible-looking fix, applied to a lower-paid exempt employee, can knock them below the salary threshold and turn a budgeting problem into an overtime liability.

Look at what happened there. You did the responsible thing. You planned ahead, you kept the annual salary constant, you divided by 27 so the total came out right. And in doing so you dropped a lower-paid exempt employee below the federal salary threshold, which means they may no longer qualify as exempt, which means they are owed overtime for every hour over forty they have worked this year.

The threshold is a weekly figure, and some states set a higher one. So the fix that is obviously correct for your VP of Sales at $150,000 may be quietly illegal for your office manager at $36,000. Whether somebody is exempt in the first place is the subject of the exempt versus non-exempt guide, and it is worth being certain before you touch anybody's per-period pay.

What worked for me
I found out about the 27th pay period from an accountant, in November, in a sentence that began with the words you may want to sit down. Not because the amount was catastrophic, but because it was completely invisible until it was not, and because I had built a payroll budget with a number in it that was simply wrong, and it had been wrong since January. What I did was absorb it, which was the only honest option by that point in the year. What I do now is count. Every December, I take next year's first payday, add fourteen days across the calendar, and count the paydays. It takes four minutes. It is the highest-return four minutes in my entire payroll year, and I did not know I needed to do it until it had already cost me.

Semimonthly and the Overtime Problem

Semimonthly is 24 periods, always, forever. No surprises, no 25th period, no accumulating drift. Which sounds like the obvious answer, and for a salaried team it may be.

For hourly staff it is a trap.

Semimonthly and hourly workers do not mix well
Overtime is calculated on the workweek, a fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours. It is not calculated on the pay period, and you cannot average two weeks together to avoid it.A biweekly period is exactly two workweeks, so the two line up perfectly and the arithmetic is clean. A semimonthly period is not. It runs from the 1st to the 15th and from the 16th to the end of the month, which means it cuts workweeks in half.So a workweek can straddle two pay periods, the overtime is earned in one of them, and it has to be paid correctly anyway. Which is an error waiting to happen, every single month, forever.
Semimonthly is a fine schedule for a salaried team. If you have hourly staff who work overtime, it is a schedule that generates payroll errors, and biweekly avoids the problem entirely by construction.

The reason is structural rather than administrative. A biweekly period is exactly two workweeks: fourteen days, two clean seven-day blocks. Overtime, which per Department of Labor guidance is calculated on the workweek and cannot be averaged across two of them, falls entirely inside the pay period, and the arithmetic is trivial.

A semimonthly period runs on calendar dates rather than weeks, so it cuts through the middle of workweeks. A workweek can begin in one pay period and end in the next. The overtime is earned in that workweek regardless, and it has to be paid correctly regardless, and now somebody has to track hours across a boundary that the payroll system does not naturally respect.

It is doable. It is a recurring source of error, every month, forever, and it is the reason biweekly is the default for hourly workforces.

What Everybody Else Does

Useful as a sanity check, because you are probably not as unusual as you think.

Biweekly Wins, and Weekly Is Closer Than You Would Guess
Per Bureau of Labor Statistics data from the Current Employment Statistics survey, biweekly was the most common length of pay period, with an estimated 43.0 percent of US private establishments paying employees every two weeks. Weekly was almost as common at 27.0 percent, with semimonthly and monthly less common. And the industry variation is enormous: 65.4 percent of construction establishments pay weekly. There is no single right answer here. There is an answer that fits your workforce, and construction has worked out what theirs is.

Two things worth taking from that.

Weekly is far more common than office-based founders assume. If your instinct is that weekly is exotic and expensive, that instinct comes from working in industries where it is. Roughly a quarter of American businesses do it.

And nothing has a majority. Biweekly is the most common and it is still under half. Whatever you choose, you are in respectable company, and there is no default you are failing to meet.

26.07
The actual number of biweekly pay periods in a calendar year. Not 26
3.85%
How much a 27th paycheck adds to your payroll cost, per employee
43.0%
Share of US private establishments paying biweekly, the most common schedule

How to Choose

The decision comes down to who you employ, not to what sounds efficient.

How to actually choose
You have hourly staff who work overtimeBiweekly
Pay periods align exactly with workweeks, so overtime calculates cleanly. Semimonthly cuts workweeks in half and generates errors
Construction, staffing, or high-turnover hourlyWeekly
It is what the workforce expects and what many of them need. Weekly is the dominant schedule in construction for a reason
Entirely salaried, small teamSemimonthly
Fixed dates, exactly 24 periods every year, and no 27th-period surprise ever. Benefits deductions divide evenly by 24
Cash is tight and admin time is scarceBiweekly, not monthly
Monthly is cheapest to run and hardest on your people, and several states do not permit it for some workers anyway
You have people in more than one stateThe strictest state's minimum
Pay frequency is set by state law, and you must satisfy the most demanding rule that reaches any of your employees
The last row is the one people forget. Pay frequency is not entirely your decision. Several states mandate a minimum, some of them differ by whether the worker is exempt, and hiring one remote person can change what you are permitted to do.

The recurring theme: the schedule is a decision about your workforce rather than about your admin. Monthly is genuinely cheapest to run and it is brutal for anybody living paycheck to paycheck, which is most hourly workers. Weekly is genuinely expensive to run and it is what a construction crew expects.

And biweekly is the compromise almost everybody lands on, which is why almost everybody is exposed to the 27th-period problem.

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It Is Not Entirely Your Decision

Pay frequency is regulated by state law, not federal law. There is no national rule saying how often you must pay people.

Several states mandate a minimum frequency. Some distinguish between exempt and non-exempt employees, permitting monthly pay for one and requiring more frequent pay for the other. Some have industry-specific rules. The Department of Labor maintains a summary of state payday requirements, and it is worth twenty minutes with the states you actually employ people in.

Which produces a familiar consequence for anybody with a distributed team. You must satisfy the strictest rule that reaches any of your employees. Hiring one remote person in a state with a demanding minimum can change what you are permitted to do for everybody, and you will not find that out from your payroll system, because it does not know where your people live unless you told it.

Changing the schedule later has its own rules. Several states require advance written notice, and the notice period varies. And regardless of law, a pay schedule change that arrives without warning, particularly one that delays somebody's next cheque, damages trust in a way that costs far more than the administrative saving it was meant to deliver. The wider landscape of state-by-state obligations is in the guide to employment law.

Setting It Up

The whole thing, in order.

1
Check what your states require
Every state where somebody actually works, not just where you are incorporated. If they differ, satisfy the strictest, because you cannot run a different pay frequency per person without it becoming a mess.
2
Look at who you employ
Hourly staff working overtime point toward biweekly, because the pay period aligns with the workweek. An entirely salaried team can take semimonthly without the overtime complication.
3
Count your paydays for next year
First payday, plus fourteen days, repeatedly, until December 31. Count them. This is how you find out whether you have 26 or 27, and it takes four minutes.
4
Work out how benefit deductions divide
Premiums are usually an annual figure divided per period. Twenty-four divides cleanly. Twenty-six does not, and twenty-seven can push somebody over an annual contribution limit if nobody adjusts it.
5
Publish the calendar before the year starts
Dates, and what happens when a payday lands on a bank holiday. Employees plan around these dates. Vagueness here generates questions you will answer individually, forever.
6
Leave a note for the next 27-period year
It is eleven or twelve years out. Nobody currently working for you will remember this. Write it down somewhere the business will still be looking.

Step four is quietly the one that bites. Benefit deductions are typically an annual premium divided by the number of pay periods. In a 27-period year, an employee contributing a fixed amount per cheque makes 27 contributions rather than 26, which for anybody near an annual limit means they overshoot it. Payroll systems are supposed to stop at the cap. Not all of them handle the edge case cleanly, and the guide to payroll deductions covers what is coming out and why.

Common Mistakes

These recur, and the first two are the expensive ones.

The Recurring Failures
Assuming a biweekly year is always 26 pay periods, when the real figure is 26.07 and the difference eventually arrives as an extra paycheck. Reading an article that says a given year has 26 periods and believing it, when the answer depends on your own first payday rather than on the year. Discovering the 27th paycheck in November, when your options have already narrowed to absorbing it. Trying to fix a 27-period year mid-year by dividing salaries by 27, which retroactively reduces pay an exempt employee has already earned. Skipping the 27th paycheck entirely on the theory that the annual salary has been paid, when the period was worked and worked periods get paid. Dividing by 27 for a lower-paid exempt employee and dropping their weekly salary below the threshold, which can cost them their exemption and cost you the overtime. Running semimonthly with hourly staff who work overtime, so workweeks are cut in half and the overtime calculation becomes a monthly source of error. Forgetting that benefit deductions divided across 26 periods become 27 in an anomalous year, pushing somebody over an annual contribution limit. Choosing monthly because it is cheapest to administer, without asking what it does to somebody living paycheck to paycheck. And assuming pay frequency is entirely your decision, when it is set by state law and a single remote hire can change what you are permitted to do.

The unifying error is treating this as a question with a fixed answer. It is not. It is a question whose answer depends on your calendar, your workforce, and your states, and the number you find in a generic article is a starting point rather than a fact about your business. The rest of the recurring small-employer failures are collected in the HR rules and regulations guide.

Have you counted your own paydays for this year?
First payday, plus fourteen days, repeatedly. Count them. Do not rely on an article that tells you what the year has in general, because the answer depends on your date.
If you have 27 periods, did you find out before the year started?
If yes, you had options. If you are finding out now, mid-year, your options have narrowed to absorbing it, because you cannot retroactively reduce pay an exempt employee has already earned.
Would dividing by 27 drop anybody below the salary threshold?
Check your lowest-paid exempt employee first. The fix that is safe at $150,000 can break the exemption at $36,000, and the exemption is worth far more than the budget saving.
Are you running semimonthly with hourly staff?
Then your pay periods cut workweeks in half, and overtime earned in a straddling workweek has to be tracked across the boundary. This is a recurring error, not a one-off.
Do you know the pay frequency rules in every state you employ people?
Not where you are incorporated. Where each person works. And you must satisfy the strictest rule that reaches any of them.
Key Takeaways
Weekly is 52 pay periods, biweekly is 26 or occasionally 27, semimonthly is exactly 24, and monthly is 12.
Biweekly is the only one that moves, and it is the most common schedule in the country, which is why this question comes up constantly.
A year is really 26.07 biweekly pay periods, not 26. The extra .07 accumulates until an extra paycheck appears every eleven or twelve years.
A 27th paycheck costs 3.85 percent of payroll per employee if you change nothing. On a team of twenty that is a serious number.
Whether it happens to you depends on the date of your first payday, not on the year. Count your own calendar rather than trusting an article.
Dividing salary by 27 works only if you decide before the year starts. Mid-year it collides with the FLSA salary basis rule.
You cannot retroactively reduce a paycheck an exempt employee has already earned, and you cannot skip a period they have worked.
Dividing by 27 can drop a lower-paid exempt employee below the salary threshold and cost them their exemption, which is worse than the budget problem.
Semimonthly cuts workweeks in half, so overtime for hourly staff straddles pay periods and becomes a monthly source of error. Biweekly avoids this by construction.
Per BLS data, 43.0 percent of US private establishments pay biweekly and 27.0 percent pay weekly. Nothing has a majority.
Pay frequency is set by state law, not federal, and you must satisfy the strictest rule that reaches any of your employees.
Benefit deductions divided across 26 periods become 27 in an anomalous year, which can push somebody over an annual contribution limit.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many pay periods are in a year?

It depends on the schedule. Weekly gives 52 pay periods, biweekly gives 26 in most years and occasionally 27, semimonthly gives exactly 24 every year, and monthly gives 12. Three of those numbers never change. Biweekly is the exception, and biweekly is also the most common schedule in the United States, which is why the question comes up so often.

How many pay periods in a year if I pay biweekly?

Twenty-six in most years, and twenty-seven roughly once every eleven or twelve years. Which one you get depends on when your first payday of the year falls, not on anything about the calendar in general. Two businesses paying biweekly, one starting January 2 and one starting January 9, can have different numbers of paydays in the same year. You have to check your own calendar rather than reading somebody else's.

Why are there sometimes 27 pay periods?

Because 26 biweekly periods cover only 364 days, and a year is 365 days, or 366 in a leap year. That leaves a one or two day gap every single year. The gap accumulates, and after about eleven or twelve years it reaches fourteen days, which is a full pay period. So an extra paycheck appears. A calendar year is really 26.07 pay periods rather than 26, and the extra .07 is what eventually catches up with you.

How many pay cycles are in a year?

Pay cycle and pay period mean the same thing in ordinary use. Weekly is 52, biweekly is 26 or occasionally 27, semimonthly is 24, and monthly is 12. If somebody is being precise, pay period tends to refer to the span of time worked and pay cycle to the recurring pattern of paying for it, but in practice the terms are used interchangeably and nothing turns on the distinction.

How many weekly paychecks are in a year?

Fifty-two. A weekly schedule pays on the same day every seven days, and there are 52 weeks in a year, so there are 52 paychecks. Weekly is the only schedule where the number is genuinely stable and intuitive. It is also the most administratively expensive to run, which is why it is more common in construction and hourly-heavy industries than in offices.

How many weeks are in a payroll year?

Fifty-two, which is where the pay period arithmetic comes from: 52 weeks means 52 weekly paychecks or 26 biweekly ones. But 52 weeks is 364 days, and a year is 365 or 366, and that one or two day difference is precisely why a 27th biweekly pay period eventually appears. The calendar and the payroll cycle do not quite fit together, and the mismatch has to go somewhere.

What is the difference between biweekly and semimonthly?

Biweekly means every fourteen days, on the same day of the week, giving 26 pay periods a year and occasionally 27. Semimonthly means twice a month on fixed calendar dates, such as the 15th and the last day, giving exactly 24 pay periods every year without exception. They sound similar and they behave very differently. Biweekly aligns with workweeks, which makes overtime straightforward. Semimonthly cuts workweeks in half, which makes overtime a recurring source of error.

What is the most common pay period?

Biweekly. Per Bureau of Labor Statistics data, biweekly was the most common length of pay period, with an estimated 43.0 percent of US private establishments paying employees every two weeks. Weekly was almost as common at 27.0 percent, with semimonthly and monthly less common. Weekly dominates in some industries: over 65 percent of construction establishments pay weekly.

Can I change my pay schedule?

Generally yes, but with conditions. You have to satisfy any minimum pay frequency your state requires, several states require advance written notice before a change takes effect, and you should not make a change that has the effect of delaying wages people have already earned. Give notice, explain the reason, and if the change affects benefit deductions, explain that too. A pay schedule change that arrives without warning damages trust in a way that is expensive to repair.

Can I choose any pay frequency I want?

Not entirely. Pay frequency is regulated at state level rather than federal, and several states mandate a minimum. Some states distinguish between exempt and non-exempt workers, some set rules for specific industries, and some effectively prohibit monthly pay for certain employees. If you have people in more than one state, you must satisfy the strictest rule that reaches any of them, and hiring a single remote person can change what you are permitted to do.

Does the pay period affect overtime?

The pay period does not determine overtime, but it can determine whether you calculate it correctly. Overtime is owed on hours over forty in a workweek, which is a fixed and recurring 168-hour period, and averaging two weeks together to avoid it is not permitted. A biweekly pay period is exactly two workweeks, so it lines up cleanly. A semimonthly period cuts workweeks in half, which means a workweek can straddle two pay periods and the overtime has to be tracked across the boundary.

How do I know if I will have 27 pay periods?

Count your own paydays. Take the date of your first payday of the year, add fourteen days repeatedly, and see how many fall within the calendar year. That is the only way to know, because it depends on your specific pay date. Do not rely on an article that tells you the answer for the year in general, because the answer differs between two businesses with different start dates, and the one who guessed wrong is the one with a payroll budget problem in December.

What should I do about a 27th pay period?

If you catch it before the year starts, you have options: divide the salary by 27 so each paycheck is slightly smaller, or budget for the extra paycheck and pay it. If you are already mid-year, your options narrow considerably, because you cannot retroactively reduce a paycheck an exempt employee has already earned and you cannot skip a period they have worked. The safe answer mid-year is usually to absorb the extra cheque and plan properly for the next occurrence, which is roughly eleven years away.

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