Biweekly Pay Calculator

Biweekly pay means a paycheck every two weeks on the same weekday — 26 checks in a normal calendar year, 27 in the occasional year where the dates line up. Each check covers exactly two workweeks, which is why two months a year (three in a 27-check year) end up holding three paydays instead of two.

How biweekly pay works

Nothing in the Fair Labor Standards Act sets how often you must be paid — pay frequency is a state rule, and the Department of Labor keeps the state-by-state table linked below. Employers pick a schedule that satisfies their state and then stay on it.

Biweekly vs. semi-monthly

The semi-monthly check is bigger, but the yearly total is identical — biweekly simply spreads it across two more checks.

Which months bring three paychecks in 2026

Your three-paycheck months depend on one thing only: the date of your first payday of the year. Count forward in 14-day steps from it and the whole year is fixed. Every possible 2026 pattern is below — find the row matching your January payday, or put any payday you know into the calculator above and it will find the row for you.

Two things worth reading off that table. First, only a January 1 payday produces 27 checks in 2026 — and because January 1, 2026 falls on a Thursday, that means only Thursday-payday employers whose year opens on the holiday itself. A January 2 (Friday) start gives the ordinary 26, with the last check landing December 18. Second, the two three-paycheck months always sit five or six months apart, and a 27-payday year is the only one with three of them.

2027 works the same way and shifts by one weekday: January 1, 2027 is a Friday, and again it is the only start date in that year that yields 27 paydays. Put 2027-01-01 in the payday field above to see it.

The 27-paycheck year — and why 26 checks can pay less than your salary

26 × 14 days = 364 days, so every year leaves one day over (two in a leap year). The slippage accumulates until a calendar year swallows a 27th payday; OPM puts the cycle at about 11 or 12 years for any given payday pattern.

What happens to your money then is an employer policy question, and the two answers are genuinely different:

• Keep the per-check amount. You receive 27 checks of the usual size, so the calendar year deposits one extra check’s worth. This is the federal government’s approach.
• Re-spread the salary. The employer divides the annual salary by 27, every check shrinks slightly, and the calendar-year total stays at your stated salary.

The federal rule is the clearer one to reason from, because OPM writes it down: basic pay “is not affected by an additional (27th) pay day,” and employees “can actually receive more or less than their annual rate of basic pay in a given calendar year.” The reason is that a federal salary is converted to an hourly rate using a 2,087-hour divisor and then paid 80 hours at a time — the biweekly rate, not the annual figure, is the thing that is fixed.

That divisor is not arbitrary either. Until 1984 the government used 2,080 hours (52 weeks × 40), which presumes a 364-day year. A 1981 GAO study of the full 28-year calendar cycle — the period after which the calendar repeats — found 4 years with 262 workdays, 17 with 261 and 7 with 260, giving (2,096 × 4 + 2,088 × 17 + 2,080 × 7) ÷ 28 = 2,087.143 hours. Congress made 2,087 permanent in 5 U.S.C. 5504(b). Private employers are under no such rule and overwhelmingly still divide by 26 — which is what the calculator above does.

Budgeting around the pattern

• Budget on 24 checks, not 26. Two months a year then arrive with a windfall instead of a shortfall — the standard trick for turning the biweekly calendar into automatic savings.
• Check a three-paycheck month’s payslip. Many employers spread monthly benefit premiums across 24 checks, so the two extra checks skip deductions and land larger than normal. Others divide by 26 evenly, and nothing changes.
• Watch the January boundary. A payday on December 31 versus January 1 moves that check into a different tax year, which is what your W-2 follows — not the year in which you did the work.