February can hold three paydays in 2028
A 28-day February cannot fit three biweekly paydays: the third lands on the 29th. In a leap year one schedule gets it. All fourteen 2028 cycles, with dates.
Three biweekly paydays in one month needs 29 days between the first and the third. February usually has 28, so it is the one month that never gets a third paycheck. In a leap year it has 29, and the cycle that happens to land on the 1st picks up deposits on the 1st, the 15th and the 29th.
In 2028 that is exactly one of the fourteen possible schedules: the one whose first payday of the year is January 4, 2028. Everyone else waits until 2032.
The fourteen 2028 schedules
A biweekly cycle repeats every fourteen days, so there are fourteen of them and no more. Find your first payday of the year and the row is yours.
| Your first 2028 payday | Paydays | Months with a third one |
|---|---|---|
| January 1, 2028 | 27 | January (1, 15, 29) · July (1, 15, 29) · December (2, 16, 30) |
| January 2, 2028 | 27 | January (2, 16, 30) · July (2, 16, 30) · December (3, 17, 31) |
| January 3, 2028 | 26 | January (3, 17, 31) · July (3, 17, 31) |
| January 4, 2028 | 26 | February (1, 15, 29) · August (1, 15, 29) |
| January 5, 2028 | 26 | March (1, 15, 29) · August (2, 16, 30) |
| January 6, 2028 | 26 | March (2, 16, 30) · August (3, 17, 31) |
| January 7, 2028 | 26 | March (3, 17, 31) · September (1, 15, 29) |
| January 8, 2028 | 26 | April (1, 15, 29) · September (2, 16, 30) |
| January 9, 2028 | 26 | April (2, 16, 30) · October (1, 15, 29) |
| January 10, 2028 | 26 | May (1, 15, 29) · October (2, 16, 30) |
| January 11, 2028 | 26 | May (2, 16, 30) · October (3, 17, 31) |
| January 12, 2028 | 26 | May (3, 17, 31) · November (1, 15, 29) |
| January 13, 2028 | 26 | June (1, 15, 29) · November (2, 16, 30) |
| January 14, 2028 | 26 | June (2, 16, 30) · December (1, 15, 29) |
Why two rows say 27
A leap year is 366 days, which is 52 weeks and two days over. A cycle anchored on either of those two days catches a 27th payday before December runs out, and a third three-payday month with it. In 2028 that is January 1, 2028 and January 2, 2028 — two rows rather than the single row an ordinary year produces.
A 27-paycheck year is the one case where the extra money is unambiguous. Every bill in a per-paycheck plan is already funded by paycheck 26, so the 27th arrives with nothing claiming it at all.
If you used the 2027 table, your row has moved
Do not carry last year’s answer forward. 2027 had 365 days, so every cycle shifted by one day going into 2028, and the leap day shifts it again at the end of February. The months that held your third paycheck last year are not the months that hold it this year.
Twice a month is untouched by all of this
Semi-monthly pay is 24 paydays, two in every month, in a leap year and out of one. There is no extra paycheck and February is not special. If your pay lands on the same dates each month rather than the same weekday, none of this applies to you.
How these dates were produced
Every date above is computed from the pay cycle when the page is built, not typed in, and the arithmetic is covered by unit tests including the leap-day and month-boundary cases where naive date maths slips a payday into the wrong month. Dates are calculated in UTC so the answer does not move with the reader’s timezone. The February claim is computed too: the row above is highlighted because the code found it, not because someone marked it.
All amounts are computed in integer cents and rounded up when splitting a bill across paychecks, so a plan never funds a bill short. Pay-period counts follow the calendar: 52 weekly, 26 biweekly, 24 semi-monthly, 12 monthly. Written by Larder, makers of an envelope budgeting app for iPhone. Last reviewed .