The 27-paycheck year explained
Why biweekly payroll occasionally produces 27 paychecks instead of 26, when it next happens, and how to plan salaries around it.
Roughly every 11 years, a calendar year that runs biweekly payroll contains 27 pay periods instead of 26. The cause is purely arithmetic: 26 biweekly periods × 14 days = 364 days, which is one day short of a normal calendar year and two days short of a leap year. The shortfall accumulates until enough days have stacked up that a 27th pay date squeezes into the year. This guide explains when it happens, why it matters, and the three options small employers have for handling it.
When the next 27-paycheck year falls
For a biweekly schedule anchored to the OPM federal calendar with pay dates on the Friday after period close, the next 27-paycheck years are 2026 and 2032 for many anchor variations. The exact year depends on what day of the week your specific anchor falls on. To check your business: count the pay dates in your published calendar; if there are 27, you're in a 27-paycheck year. The schedules on this site count and display the period total automatically.
Why it matters
Salaried employees on biweekly payroll receive their annual salary divided by the number of pay periods in the year. In a 26-period year, $52,000/year = $2,000 per check. In a 27-period year, the same salary divided by 27 = $1,925 per check — a 3.7% per-paycheck cut without any change to the underlying compensation. Hourly employees are unaffected because they're paid for hours worked, not on a divided-salary basis.
The three options
Option 1: Pay an extra paycheck. Treat the 27-paycheck year as a windfall and pay each salaried employee 27 times their normal per-paycheck amount. Total annual compensation goes from $52,000 to $54,000 in the example above. This is the simplest approach, the most popular with employees, and the cleanest from an accounting perspective — but it's a 3.85% across-the-board raise that hits the salary line of your P&L without any corresponding revenue.
Option 2: Recalculate the per-paycheck amount. Divide the annual salary by 27 instead of 26 for the affected year, so total annual compensation stays at $52,000 but each individual paycheck is smaller. This avoids the salary-line surprise but produces a noticeable per-paycheck dip that employees will notice and ask about. Most small employers find the morale hit isn't worth the savings.
Option 3: Skip the 27th paycheck. Pay 26 paychecks at the normal amount and skip the 27th. This is the most aggressive option, the most likely to produce a complaint to your state labor board, and the most likely to expose you to a wage payment statute violation if your state requires regular paydays. We don't recommend it.
Planning ahead
If you're running a small business that will encounter a 27-paycheck year within the next 24 months, build the extra paycheck into your salary budget now. The simplest approach is to multiply each salaried employee's per-paycheck amount by 27 (instead of 26) when forecasting that year's salary line. The extra paycheck is roughly 1/27 of one employee's annual salary — small per employee, manageable for a small team, but real money for any business with payroll over a few hundred thousand dollars a year. Use a payroll budgeting calculator if you want to see the impact across multiple years and salary brackets.
Why semi-monthly avoids this
Semi-monthly payroll has exactly 24 pay periods per year, every year, by definition. There is no 27-period year. This is one of the underrated arguments in favor of semi-monthly payroll for salary-heavy small businesses — the predictability of the per-paycheck amount over a multi-year horizon. If 27-paycheck-year planning sounds like a recurring annoyance you'd rather not deal with, the cleanest solution is to switch to semi-monthly on a January 1 boundary.
Communicating with employees
Whichever option you pick, communicate it in writing at least 60 days before the affected pay period. The communication should explain why the year contains 27 periods, what the per-paycheck amount will be, and how the year's total compensation compares to a normal year. Employees who learn about a 3.7% per-paycheck cut on the morning of payday have a legitimate complaint; employees who were told two months in advance and saw their year-over-year total compensation go up by 3.85% almost never do.