What Is Weekly Pay?
Weekly pay is a payroll method that compensates employees on a weekly basis. It uses a day of the week as the weekly payday, which is most commonly Friday—the end of the workweek. However, some companies use Monday as their weekly payday, though you can use other workdays as well.
What is the advantage of using weekly pay?
The main advantage of a weekly payroll is that it can be an attractive perk for many professionals. Getting paid in smaller increments but more frequently can help people manage their finances more effectively. It will give your staff a higher degree of financial mobility, enabling them to deal with emergencies more easily.
How many weekly paychecks are there in a year and a month?
Using weekly payroll, you’ll have 52 paychecks per year and 4 paychecks per month on average. However, due to the way the calendar works, some periods will have one more paycheck. This depends on what day of the week a year or month starts on. For example, if a month starts on your weekly payday, it will be a five-paycheck month.
What is the downside of weekly payroll?
The main downside of weekly paychecks is that your company will have to process more of them over the long run. Compared to a method like biweekly pay, which involves only 26 payments per year, weekly payments will be more costly—both in terms of labor and transaction costs.
How does weekly pay work?
A weekly schedule fixes two things: a pay period (usually Sunday through Saturday or Monday through Sunday) and a payday, most often the Friday after the period closes. The week in between exists so hours can be totalled, approved and processed. Hourly employees are paid their rate times the hours in that week, plus overtime where the week crossed the threshold — one of weekly pay’s quiet advantages is that the pay period and the overtime week line up exactly.
To see the working days in any period, use our free pay period calculator; to turn a rate into an actual weekly paycheck, the hourly paycheck calculator does it in one step.
Weekly vs biweekly vs semi-monthly pay
| Method | Paychecks per year | Typical paydays |
|---|---|---|
|
Weekly |
52 |
Every Friday |
|
Biweekly |
26 |
Every other Friday |
|
Semi-monthly |
24 |
1st and 15th, or 15th and last day |
The trade-off is frequency against processing: biweekly pay halves the pay runs, semi-monthly pay aligns them with the calendar month, and weekly pay wins on employee cash flow. Months with five paydays exist in every weekly and biweekly calendar — the five-paycheck months guide lists them per year.
What does a rate turn into on Friday?
Enter an hourly rate and weekly hours in the free WebWork hourly paycheck calculator and see the weekly, biweekly and yearly paycheck at once.
How to manage weekly pay in your business?
To manage weekly payroll more effectively, you should use a payroll tracking solution. Apps like WebWork, which combines automated time tracking and payroll, can help you streamline your payroll management work significantly. If Gusto runs your payroll, Gusto time tracking in WebWork exports each week’s earned amounts in Gusto’s native format. Moreover, you can use its productivity monitoring functionality to help your staff perform their best.
