How the two-week card counts
Pick the first day of the pay period. The card fills with fourteen dated rows, split into week one and week two. Type each clock in and clock out. A day you left and came back gets a second pair with +, and there is no limit to the pairs. The unpaid break box is for time taken off without a punch, such as a lunch the payroll system deducts by itself.
After the seventh day and after the fourteenth, a line totals that week on its own: hours worked, then how many of them are regular and how many are overtime. The stub at the bottom adds the two weeks together. Overtime is never worked out on the fourteen days as one block, because that is not how it is owed.
The card takes the first day of the pay period as the first day of week one, which is how most biweekly payrolls are set up. If your employer's workweek starts on a different day from the pay period, the two weeks on this card will not line up with the weeks your overtime is counted in, and you should start the card on the first day of a workweek instead.
Why overtime is counted one week at a time
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, each workweek stands alone. The regulation says it plainly: the Act "does not permit averaging of hours over 2 or more weeks." A workweek is any fixed run of seven days your employer chooses, and overtime is owed on the hours over forty inside it, whatever happens in the week before or after.
So a fortnight of 50 hours and then 30 hours is 80 hours in all, the same as two normal weeks, but it is not two normal weeks. The first week has ten hours of overtime and the second has none. Averaged, it would come out at forty a week and no overtime at all, and that average is exactly the mistake the rule forbids. Type 50 and 30 into the card and the week lines show the ten hours where they belong.
The overtime is paid on the payday of the period in which that workweek ends. On a biweekly schedule where the weeks line up with the pay period, that is the same paycheck.
The 8 and 80 system
There is one exception, and it only exists on a two-week period. Hospitals and residential care establishments such as nursing homes may agree with their staff, before the work is done, to count overtime over 8 hours in any workday and over 80 hours in the fourteen days, instead of over 40 in a week. Choose 8 and 80 under overtime and the card does it that way: the week lines show the daily overtime, and anything over 80 for the fortnight is added once in the total. A 50 and 30 fortnight in eight hour days is no overtime at all under 8 and 80. A single twelve hour shift is four hours of overtime, even in a short fortnight. If you do not work in a hospital or care home, or there was no agreement, this rule is not yours.
26 or 27 paydays
Twenty-six two-week periods are 364 days, one day short of a year, and two days short in a leap year. So your paydays fall a day earlier in the calendar every year. Most years that changes nothing. But when a payday lands on the 1st of January, or on the 2nd in a leap year, that year has a twenty-seventh payday. It happens about once every eleven years for any one schedule.
It is about to happen to one of the two Friday schedules. Fridays fall on both the 1st of January and the 31st of December 2027, so an employer paying every other Friday whose first 2027 payday is the 1st of January pays 27 times in 2027. The other Friday schedule, starting the 8th of January, pays 26. The calendar above shows which one you are on: put in your own pay period and read the count.
For someone paid by the hour, a 27th payday is just another paycheck. For a salaried employee it is a question. If the employer divides the annual salary by 26, the 27th check is a whole extra payment on the year. If it divides by 27, every check that year is smaller. Both are done, and the time to ask which is before the year starts.
The calendar also marks the months with three paydays. With 26 paydays there are two of them a year. They are the months people budget around, since most monthly bills only need two.
Biweekly or semi-monthly
Biweekly is every other week: 26 paychecks a year, always on the same weekday. Semi-monthly is twice a month, usually on the 15th and the last day: 24 paychecks a year, on whatever weekday the date falls. On a $52,000 salary a biweekly check is $2,000.00 and a semi-monthly check is $2,166.67. The year comes out the same, but the checks are different sizes, and mixing the two up is the most common reason a first paycheck looks wrong.
For hourly work the difference is overtime. A semi-monthly period does not line up with workweeks, so a week often starts in one period and ends in the next, and its overtime belongs to the period it ends in. A biweekly period is exactly two workweeks, so every week's overtime is on the paycheck for that period. For a semi-monthly card, use the time card calculator and choose semi-monthly.
Questions people ask
My pay period starts on a Sunday. Does that matter?
Pick that Sunday as the first day and the card runs Sunday to Saturday twice. Any weekday works; the card uses whatever date you give it.
I worked 45 hours one week and 35 the next. Is that overtime?
Yes, five hours of it, in the first week, under the usual over-40 rule. The fortnight total of 80 does not cancel it.
Where do I find which Friday schedule I am on?
Put any pay period you know into the card, using its first day. The calendar works out every other period from it, before and after, and counts the paydays in the year.
Does it round the times?
No. It counts the exact minutes you enter. If your employer rounds punches to the quarter hour, the totals here may differ by a few minutes a day.
Is my time card sent anywhere?
No. Everything is worked out inside your browser, and what you type is kept in this browser only, so the card is still here if you come back. Clear removes it. Nothing reaches a server.