Biweekly payroll
A 14-day pay period producing 26 (occasionally 27) paychecks per year.
Biweekly payroll pays employees every two weeks on a fixed weekday — almost always Friday in the United States — producing 26 paychecks in a normal year and 27 in a leap-aligned year. The cadence dominates hourly-heavy industries (restaurants, retail, construction, home health, hospitality) because every pay period covers exactly two seven-day workweeks, which keeps Fair Labor Standards Act overtime calculations clean.
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management anchors federal biweekly payroll to the first Sunday on or before January 1 of each year. Pay period 1 runs Sunday through the second following Saturday, pay period 2 starts the following Sunday, and so on. Most small-business payroll software and PEOs follow the same anchor convention.
The two well-known quirks of biweekly payroll are (a) the 27-paycheck year, which occurs roughly every 11 years and forces a salary-budget adjustment; and (b) the per-pay-period deduction recalculation problem, where benefits premiums and other per-paycheck amounts produce slightly different annual totals than they would under semi-monthly payroll. Both are manageable but require explicit attention.
See the biweekly schedules page for state-by-state calendars across all years on offer, or the biweekly vs. semi-monthly comparison for the full decision framework.