Biweekly Pay Calculator

Pay per period ＝ annual salary ÷ 26　｜　received over the year ＝ pay per period × pay dates

annualSalary

The contracted yearly figure, before anything is taken out of it. It is the input the per-period rate is derived from, not a total the page is trying to reproduce: whether a year actually pays the salary back in full is the question the last three rows answer, and the answer depends on the calendar. Every figure this page prints is gross, so a salary quoted as take-home is the wrong number to type here.

payDatesInYear

How many times your payroll calendar pays you during the year — 26 in most years, 27 in the occasional year that fits an extra fortnight. This is the one field that makes the page different from a plain salary conversion, and it is not something the calculator can work out for you: a biweekly calendar drifts against the year, so which years carry 27 depends on the weekday your pay dates are anchored to. Read it off your own calendar or payslip.

biweeklyRateBasis

Which of two methods sets the per-period amount. A pro-rata basis divides the annual salary by 26, which is the common private payroll. The statutory basis is the sequence United States federal law gives for converting an annual rate of basic pay into a biweekly one: divide by 2,087 to get an hourly rate, round that to the nearest cent, then multiply by 80. Choosing one over the other changes the per-period amount by a few tenths of a percent, which is small per paycheck and not small per year.

payPerPeriod

The amount one paycheck holds, and the main result. It is deliberately unaffected by the pay-date count: switch the count from 26 to 27 and this figure does not move, because it comes from the annual salary and a fixed divisor. That is the point of the page rather than an omission — the extra paycheck in a 27-pay-date year is a whole extra period, not the same money sliced thinner.

receivedInYear

What the per-period amount actually adds up to over the year, which is simply the paycheck multiplied by the number of pay dates. It is the row to read when you want to know what lands in your account across twelve months rather than what one paycheck says, and it is where a 27-pay-date year announces itself: it comes out above the annual salary, not equal to it.

differenceFromSalary

Received over the year minus the annual salary, and it is signed. Under a pro-rata basis with 26 pay dates it is exactly zero, which is the one equality on this page you can check in your head. With 27 pay dates it is positive and equals one whole paycheck. Under the statutory basis it can be negative in a 26-pay-date year, because that method's divisor is not exactly 26.

differencePercent

The same difference as a share of the annual salary, so that the size of the effect is readable without knowing the salary. Under a pro-rata basis the two values are 0 and 3.85 percent, the second being exactly one twenty-sixth. Under the statutory basis they are about minus 0.34 percent and plus 3.50 percent, and the fact that the second is smaller than 3.85 is the whole reason the two bases are not interchangeable.

effectiveDivisor

The annual salary divided by the per-period amount, printed so the assumption is visible rather than buried. Under a pro-rata basis it reads exactly 26.0000. Under the statutory basis it lands near 26.0875 without landing on it, because the hourly rate is rounded to the cent before being multiplied by 80 — 89,033 gives 26.0880, 70,623 gives 26.0871. That small gap is the rounding the law asks for, not an error to be corrected.

Use it when you are paid every two weeks and want to know what the year actually pays, especially in a year whose calendar carries 27 pay dates. Use it also to check a payslip against a contract: if the per-period figure on the statement does not match the salary divided by 26, the difference is usually the statutory conversion order rather than a payroll error. Use it before a budget conversation, because the two pay-date counts are a whole paycheck apart and that is the one input nobody thinks to check. Do not use it when what you actually know is an hourly rate and the hours you work — the pages that take hours a week and weeks a year are built for that question. Do not use it to estimate take-home pay either, since nothing here subtracts income tax, a pension contribution or an insurance premium. And do not use it as a general salary converter: it only speaks biweekly, and the page that converts between weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, monthly and annual figures is a different one.

1. Default case: 65,000 over 26 pay dates

   1. Pay per period: 65,000 ÷ 26 ＝ 2,500.00
   2. Received over the year: 2,500.00 × 26 ＝ 65,000.00
   3. Difference: 65,000.00 − 65,000 ＝ 0.00（0.00%）；effective divisor 65,000 ÷ 2,500 ＝ 26.0000

   The only exact equality this page produces, and the reason the default salary is 65,000 rather than a rounder figure: it divides by 26 without a remainder, so the difference row reads a clean zero. Every other row on the panel is a consequence of that one.

2. The same salary over 27 pay dates

   1. Pay per period: 65,000 ÷ 26 ＝ 2,500.00　（unchanged — the divisor is 26, not 27）
   2. Received over the year: 2,500.00 × 27 ＝ 67,500.00
   3. Difference: 67,500.00 − 65,000 ＝ +2,500.00，即 +3.85%（正好是 1/26）

   Compare this with the previous case row by row: the per-period amount and the effective divisor are identical, and only the last three rows moved. That is the whole lesson. The extra money is one entire paycheck, not the same salary redistributed, which is why a 27-pay-date year is worth noticing when you plan around it.

3. The statutory method over 26 pay dates

   1. Hourly rate: 89,033 ÷ 2,087 ＝ 42.6607…，舍到分 ⇒ 42.66
   2. Pay per period: 42.66 × 80 ＝ 3,412.80
   3. Received over the year: 3,412.80 × 26 ＝ 88,732.80；difference −300.20，即 −0.34%

   This is the worked example on the Office of Personnel Management's own page about the 2,087-hour divisor, carried through to the end. The agency writes the total as 88,733 because it rounds to whole dollars; the arithmetic here keeps the cents. Note the sign: a full year of biweekly paydates pays less than the annual rate, which is the opposite of what most people expect and exactly what the agency's phrase more or less is warning about.

4. The statutory method over 27 pay dates

   1. Pay per period: 3,412.80（与上一条相同——每期金额与发薪次数无关）
   2. Received over the year: 3,412.80 × 27 ＝ 92,145.60
   3. Difference: 92,145.60 − 89,033 ＝ +3,112.60，即 +3.50%

   The agency's page gives 92,146 for this year. The percentage is worth comparing with the pro-rata case: plus 3.50 rather than plus 3.85, even though both are one extra paycheck. The reason is that the statutory method's real divisor is about 26.0875, so one extra period is a slightly smaller share of the salary. Two bases, two answers, same calendar.

This page multiplies and adds up; it does not compute a take-home figure. Nothing here subtracts income tax, social insurance, a pension contribution, a student loan repayment or a union due, so every amount is gross. It cannot tell you how many pay dates your year has. That is a property of your employer's payroll calendar, which drifts against the calendar year because 26 fortnights come to 364 days, and reading it off the calendar is the one thing you have to do before the page is useful. It models only one pay frequency: semimonthly pay, which also pays twice a month but always lands 24 times and never drifts, is a different arrangement and the salary conversion page is where that one lives, along with weekly pay, which has its own 53-paydate years. It assumes the annual salary and the per-period amount stay fixed for the whole year, so a raise, a bonus, overtime or unpaid leave will push the real total away from the printed one. It assumes every pay period in the year is the same length, which is true of a biweekly calendar by construction but not true of what happens inside those two weeks. It does not model the withholding question at all: a 27th pay date can affect how tax is withheld in some systems, and that is not something these three fields can reach. It does not convert currencies or attach one to the figures, which is deliberate, since the arithmetic is identical in every currency and a unit would only invite reading the numbers as being about a particular country. It does not decide whether your particular payroll uses the pro-rata divisor or the statutory one — that is what the second dropdown is for, and the honest answer is that you may have to ask payroll or read a payslip to know. Finally, the page treats the count you select as a fact about the year, not as a forecast: it will happily compute a 27-pay-date year for you even if yours turns out to have 26.

Does a 27 pay date year mean my paycheck gets smaller?

No, and this is the assumption the page is built to correct. The per-period amount is a rate an employer sets from the annual salary with a fixed divisor, so it does not move when the calendar happens to pay an extra time. What a 27-pay-date year does is pay that unchanged rate one extra time, which lands the year above the annual salary rather than on it. If your employer does instead divide the salary by the number of paydates in the year, then the paycheck does shrink a little — but that is a different, less common arrangement, and the pro-rata basis on this page models the usual one.

Why is the divisor 26 and not 26.07?

Because a biweekly rate is a payroll calendar fact rather than a division of the year's length. Twenty-six fortnights come to 364 days, which is a day short of a common year and two short of a leap year, so a calendar that pays every two weeks does not line up with the year — it drifts, and roughly every eleven years the drift is enough to fit a 27th pay date in. Dividing 365 by 14 gives 26.07, a number no payroll system uses because pay dates have to land on real weekdays.

What is the 2,087-hour divisor and why does it make a year pay less?

It is the average number of work hours in a calendar year over the 28-year cycle in which the calendar repeats, and United States federal law uses it to convert an annual rate of basic pay into an hourly one. Because 2,087 divided by 80 is about 26.0875 rather than 26, the resulting biweekly rate is a shade smaller than the annual salary divided by 26 — so 26 pay dates return slightly less than the annual rate. The same arithmetic run for 27 pay dates returns more. The agency that publishes the method says outright that employees can receive more or less than their annual rate in a given calendar year.

Which basis should I pick?

If you are paid by a private employer in the ordinary way, the pro-rata basis is almost certainly the one your payroll uses, and it will match your payslip to the cent. The statutory basis exists because some employers, and the United States federal government in particular, are required to convert an annual rate through an hourly rate with the 2,087-hour divisor. The two differ by a few tenths of a percent, so picking the wrong one gives a plausible number rather than an obviously broken one — the fastest way to settle it is to divide your annual salary by a pay stub's gross amount and see whether the answer is 26 or about 26.09.

How is this different from a general salary calculator?

The other page converts one pay frequency into another — weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, monthly, annual — and it fixes biweekly at 26 payments a year, because inside a pure conversion the number of payments is part of the definition rather than a variable. This page takes the salary as given and asks what the calendar does with it, which is why it carries a pay-date count that a conversion page has no use for. If your question is what a biweekly figure is worth as an annual one, that is the other page; if it is what this particular year pays you, it is this one.

Does this page apply outside the United States?

The arithmetic does, because dividing a salary by the number of pay periods is not a national rule. The statutory basis does not: it is one specific country's conversion sequence, quoted here because it is the best-documented example of a payroll rate that is not a plain pro-rata, and because its rounding produces the small shortfall that makes the two bases distinguishable at all. Everything the page prints is a gross amount with no currency attached, deliberately, so the figures read the same wherever you are.

• 5 U.S.C. §5504 — Biweekly pay periods; computation of pay: a pay period covers two administrative workweeks, and an annual rate is converted by dividing by 2,087 for the hourly rate and then multiplying by 40 or 80, with rates rounded to the nearest cent — Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School (United States)
• 26 U.S.C. §3401(b) — the statutory definition of a payroll period, the closed list of periods that includes biweekly and semimonthly as separate ones, and the catch-all term miscellaneous payroll period for anything outside that list — Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School (United States)
• Fact Sheet: Computing Hourly Rates of Pay Using the 2,087-Hour Divisor — the section on 26 or 27 pay dates, an annual rate of 89,033 carried through to 88,733 or 92,146 depending on the count, the 364-day assumption behind a 52-week year, and the 28-year cycle of 260, 261 and 262 workday years — U.S. Office of Personnel Management (United States)
• How to Compute Rates of Pay — a second worked example using the 2026 pay tables: an annual rate of 70,623 becomes 33.84 an hour and then 2,707.20 per biweekly period, computed under 5 U.S.C. 5504 — U.S. Office of Personnel Management (United States)