Biweekly payroll calendars
Employees are paid every two weeks on a fixed weekday, producing 26 pay periods per year (occasionally 27 in a leap-aligned year). This is the most common payroll frequency for small businesses and startups in the United States.
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Browse all biweekly calendars by state
Each cell links to a complete schedule with start/end dates, pay dates, and federal holiday adjustment notes.
How biweekly payroll works in practice
Biweekly payroll runs on a 14-day pay period, almost always Sunday-to-Saturday in the U.S., with pay dates landing on the Friday or Thursday following period close. The cadence has two practical advantages for small businesses: every pay stub covers an integer number of weeks, which keeps overtime calculations under the Fair Labor Standards Act simple, and the period boundaries align cleanly with the way most time-tracking software (When I Work, Deputy, Homebase, QuickBooks Time) records hours.
The cadence has one well-known quirk: roughly every 11 years, a calendar year contains 27 biweekly pay periods instead of 26. Salaried employees on biweekly payroll either receive an extra paycheck that year (the simplest, most-employee-friendly option) or have their per-paycheck salary recalculated on a 27-period basis (which avoids over-payment but produces an awkward dip). Plan for the next 27-period year when you build your annual budget.
Bank settlement risk is the other thing to watch. Biweekly pay dates that land on a federal holiday observed by the Federal Reserve cannot be funded that day; ACH credits scheduled for that date will arrive the next business day unless you fund earlier. The schedules on this site already roll those dates back to the prior business day so you don't get caught.