Colorado Biweekly payroll calendars
Every biweekly payroll schedule we publish for Colorado small businesses, 2020 through 2027 — with federal holiday adjustments and IRS payroll tax deposit deadlines already worked out.
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Why biweekly works in Colorado
Colorado's wage payment statute permits biweekly payroll for nearly every category of private-sector employer, which is why it is the dominant cadence in the state's hourly-heavy industries. Restaurants, retail, home health, construction, and most manufacturing run biweekly because every pay stub covers exactly two seven-day workweeks, which keeps Fair Labor Standards Act overtime math straightforward and makes the per-pay-period reconciliation between time-tracking software and the payroll register simple. The schedules below all use the U.S. Office of Personnel Management's federal pay-period anchor — pay period 1 begins on the first Sunday on or before January 1 of each year — so they match the cadence used by every federal contractor and most PEOs operating in Colorado.
The published pay date in our biweekly schedule is the Thursday following the close of the pay period. If your business prefers to pay on Fridays, shift the entire column forward by one day and re-apply the prior-business-day rule for any holiday conflicts. The two most common holiday clusters that shift biweekly pay dates in Colorado are Independence Day (which always shifts the pay date when July 4 lands on a Friday) and the late-December run of Christmas and New Year's Day. The schedules below already handle both for every year on offer.
Switch to a different cadence
If biweekly isn't the right fit, the Colorado semi-monthly overview covers the same eight years on the alternate schedule. Most Colorado employers can switch frequencies once per year on a clean January 1 boundary; the guide on switching payroll frequency walks through the mechanics of doing it without short-changing or double-paying any employee.