27 Pay Periods: Which Years Have Them and What It Does to Your Paycheck

Why 27 happens

A biweekly schedule pays every 14 days. Twenty-six paydays cover 364 days, so each year the schedule drifts one day later (two in a leap year) relative to the calendar. After enough drift, a payday that used to fall in the first days of January lands on January 1 — and that year gets 27 paydays: the first on January 1, the last on December 31. In a leap year the window is one day wider: a first payday on January 1 or 2 both produce 27, with the last one on December 30 or 31.

Which year it happens to you depends on your employer's payday phase, not just the weekday. Two employers that both pay on Fridays can be a week apart, and only one of them will hit 27 in a given year. The way to know is to count paydays in the year from your own last payday, which is what the payday calendar tool does.

Which upcoming years can have 27 Friday paydays

Computed by walking a biweekly schedule through each year from the two possible Friday phases — first payday on the first Friday of January, or on the second — and counting the paydays that land in the year:

What employers do about it

For salaried employees, an employer has three choices, and the choice is a policy decision they should announce before the year starts. The first is to divide the annual salary by 27 instead of 26, so each check is about 3.7% smaller but the yearly total is unchanged. The second is to keep the check the same and pay 27 of them — an unplanned extra check, which costs the employer a period of salary and is common when nobody noticed in time. The third is to pay the usual check and treat the 27th as an advance that reduces the following year's checks, which is unpopular and rarely used.

Benefit deductions follow the same logic. A health premium set at 'annual cost ÷ 26' collected 27 times over-collects, so many payroll teams skip deductions on the extra check or recompute them at ÷ 27. Check the first stub of a 27-period year for both the gross and the deductions.

Hourly workers are unaffected — mostly

If you're hourly, the 27th check is just the pay for the 27th two-week period of hours, and the year's gross is the hours you worked times your rate, as always. There's no annual salary being sliced, so there's nothing to spread. Overtime, differentials and holiday premiums are computed per workweek and don't know or care how many paydays the year holds.

Two things can still move. Anything deducted or paid as a fixed amount per paycheck — a flat 401(k) contribution, a union due, a garnishment, a per-check benefit premium — happens one extra time. And salary-plus-hourly hybrids (a guaranteed base plus shift pay) get the salary treatment on the base portion. Shift workers on a 2-2-3 or similar 14-day rotation have one more quirk: a biweekly payday that aligns with the cycle always pairs one heavy week with one light week, so a 27th check looks like every other check — it doesn't fall on an unusually heavy or light period.

Semimonthly, weekly, and the 53-week year

Semimonthly pay (the 15th and the last day) is always 24 checks, which is why some employers switch to it to avoid the whole issue — at the cost of paydays that no longer line up with workweeks and overtime that has to be split across two checks. Weekly pay has the same drift as biweekly at twice the speed: most years have 52 paydays, and every five or six years there are 53. The same salary-spread question applies, with 1/53 instead of 1/27.

Plan the year in one click

The payday calendar takes your last payday and frequency, lists every payday for the next twelve months, flags a 27-period year when your phase hits one, and exports an .ics so paydays show up next to your shifts. Try January 1, 2027 as the anchor to see a 27-payday year.

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