About PayPeriod Guide
PayPeriod Guide is an independent reference site that publishes payroll schedule calendars for the kinds of employers that don't have a full-time payroll department: bootstrapped LLCs, two-person agencies, restaurant owners, dental offices, construction GCs, nonprofits, and venture-backed startups still figuring out their first compensation policy.
We started PayPeriod Guide because the public sources for this information — the U.S. Office of Personnel Management's pay period calendar, the OPM federal holiday schedule, and the IRS's small-business payroll tax deposit guidance — are scattered across several federal websites, written for federal employers, and almost never combined into a usable calendar for a private small business. Bookkeepers solve this by maintaining their own spreadsheets. PEOs solve it by hiding it inside their software. Everyone else Googles, finds a blog post from 2017, and has to redo the math themselves.
This site is the spreadsheet, published. For every U.S. state, every year from 2020 through 2027, and every common small-business pay frequency (biweekly and semi-monthly), we publish a complete pay schedule that already accounts for federal holiday observance, weekend bank closures, and the small-business convention of pulling pay dates earlier rather than later when there's a conflict.
What this site is not
PayPeriod Guide is not a payroll provider, not a tax filing service, and not a substitute for licensed payroll, tax, or legal counsel. The schedules here are reference material. Before you anchor a real pay cadence to one of them, please confirm with the IRS, your state department of labor, and a CPA or registered payroll professional that the cadence satisfies your obligations under the Fair Labor Standards Act, your state wage payment statute, and any prevailing-wage or union contract that applies to your workforce.
We also do not publish weekly or monthly schedules in the main directory. Weekly is rare outside construction and union shops; monthly is restricted by most state wage payment statutes to executive, administrative, and professional employees. Both are mentioned in context where they matter, but they are not the focus of the calendar grid.
How the data is updated
Schedules are regenerated from the source rules at build time. When OPM publishes a future-year pay period calendar (typically in October of the prior year), or when Congress designates a new federal holiday (the most recent example is Juneteenth, designated June 17, 2021), we re-run the seed and re-publish the affected years. Each schedule page is a static read of the same underlying data — there is no JavaScript fetching, no client-side rendering, and no pagination.
Who we are
PayPeriod Guide is a small reference project built and maintained independently. We are not affiliated with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the Internal Revenue Service, or any payroll vendor. We do not collect personal information from visitors, we do not require an account, and we do not gate any schedule behind a paywall or email signup.
If you spot an error in a schedule — a wrong holiday observance, a pay date that doesn't match what your state requires, or a missing edge case — the fastest fix is to compare against the source documents linked from the methodology page and let us know which calendar is affected.