Free, printable biweekly and semi-monthly payroll calendars for every U.S. state — with federal holiday adjustments, IRS tax deposit deadlines, and the prior-business-day rule already worked out for you.
PayDate Guide is the free, printable payroll calendar reference small-business owners actually Google when they're setting up payroll for the first time, switching providers, or trying to figure out whether the 4th of July moves their Friday paycheck. Every schedule on this site is computed from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management's federal pay-period anchors, the eleven federal holidays codified at 5 U.S.C. §6103, and the IRS payroll tax deposit rules in Publication 15 — not scraped from a competitor or copied out of a 2017 blog post.
Illustrative photo. Marking a pay date on the calendar — the exact date each schedule on this site computes for you.
How small businesses actually choose between biweekly and semi-monthly
Most U.S. small businesses pick between biweekly (26 paychecks per year, paid every other Friday) and semi-monthly (24 paychecks per year, paid on the 15th and the last day of the month). The two look almost identical at first — until you actually run a quarter of payroll. Hourly-heavy businesses (restaurants, retail, construction, home health) tend toward biweekly because every pay stub covers an integer number of weeks, which keeps Fair Labor Standards Act overtime math simple. Salary-heavy businesses (software startups, professional services firms, agencies) tend toward semi-monthly because each paycheck is exactly 1/24 of annual base — easier to forecast, easier to reconcile to grant vesting, and easier to explain in an offer letter.
The catch on both is the same: federal holidays. Whenever a scheduled pay date lands on a Saturday, Sunday, or one of the eleven federal holidays the U.S. OPM observes, banks won't move money, and you have to shift the pay date earlier (the small-business default) or later. Every calendar on this site already handles that shift for every period of every year, plus surfaces the IRS semi-weekly and monthly deposit deadline that applies to each pay date.
Built from public payroll sources
Every schedule on this site is generated from publicly published U.S. Office of Personnel Management pay-period anchors and federal holiday rules, cross-referenced against the IRS payroll tax deposit deadlines published in IRS Publication 15 (Circular E). See the methodology page for the exact computation, holiday observance rules, and edge cases.
