Semi-monthly pay schedule 2027: the 24 paydays

All 24 paydays of 2027

The table follows the most common semi-monthly pattern, the 15th and the last calendar day, with dates moved to the business day before a weekend or a bank holiday. Bank holidays are the closure days of the Federal Reserve Banks, the days when a direct deposit cannot settle.

The last-day payday moves more often than the 15th, because month ends drift through the week: in 2027, January, February, July and October end on a weekend, and May ends on Memorial Day. A February payday on the last day is the 28th in 2027, the 29th only in a leap year such as 2028.

Choosing the two days

Employers pick the pair that fits their payroll cut-off. The 15th and the last day pays each half of the month as soon as it ends. The 1st and the 15th pays it later, often with an arrears week, and meets New Year’s Day, which 5 U.S.C. 6103 fixes on January 1. Run that pair in the generator and the first payday of 2027 moves to Monday, January 4, 2027 if your employer pays the next business day, or into the last day of 2026 if it pays the business day before.

Some payrolls choose the 10th and the 25th, or the 5th and the 20th, to keep paydays away from month ends. The menus of the generator take any day from the 1st to the 28th, plus “last day of the month”, which stays right in February and in 30-day months.

Semi-monthly pay and the workweek

A semi-monthly period is 15 or 16 days, sometimes 13 or 14 in February, and never a whole number of weeks. That matters for employees who are not exempt from overtime. The federal rule counts overtime by workweek, so the payroll has to assign each week to a period. For a salaried employee paid semi-monthly, 29 CFR 778.113 gives the conversion used to find the regular rate: the semi-monthly salary multiplied by 24 and divided by 52 is the weekly equivalent. A $2,500 semi-monthly salary is $1,153.85 a week, and the hourly regular rate follows from the hours that salary is meant to cover.

For hourly workers, semi-monthly pay means the hours of the period are paid on the period’s payday, with any overtime of a week that ends in the period. The paycheck calculator shows the same gross pay under each frequency, and the working days 2027 page counts the weekdays in each half-month if your pay depends on days worked.

Semi-monthly or biweekly: what changes for you

For the same salary, the yearly total is identical. What differs is the rhythm: a semi-monthly check is larger, $2,500 on a $60,000 salary against $2,307.69 biweekly, but there are two fewer of them, and none of the “third paycheck months” that biweekly earners know. Rent and loan payments due on fixed days line up better with fixed paydays, which is why some employers prefer them; weekly-minded budgets line up better with biweekly pay.