Semi-monthly payroll
A pay schedule paying twice a month on fixed dates, producing 24 paychecks per year.
Semi-monthly payroll pays employees twice a month on fixed calendar dates — typically the 15th and the last day of the month — producing exactly 24 paychecks per year. The cadence dominates salary-heavy industries (software, professional services, agencies, dentistry, law) because each paycheck represents exactly 1/24 of annual base salary, which makes offer letters, equity vesting, and budget forecasts trivially easy to reconcile.
Several U.S. states require semi-monthly payroll for non-exempt employees as a baseline. California Labor Code §204 requires wages earned 1–15 to be paid by the 26th and wages earned 16–end to be paid by the 10th of the following month. Texas Labor Code §61.011 requires semi-monthly pay for non-exempt employees with paydays "as nearly equally spaced as possible." Illinois 820 ILCS 115/3, Tennessee, Arkansas, and several others impose similar minimums.
The trade-off most semi-monthly employers don't appreciate until they hire their first non-exempt employee is overtime: semi-monthly pay periods don't align to whole workweeks, so calculating Fair Labor Standards Act overtime requires tracking a separate seven-day workweek alongside the pay period. For salary-only workforces this is a non-issue. For mixed teams, biweekly is usually the simpler choice.
See the semi-monthly schedules page for state-by-state calendars, or the comparison guide to choose between the two.