Your annual take-home pay is one number, but what actually hits your account depends on how often you're paid. This calculator breaks it down per paycheck.
Common pay frequencies
Monthly (12 periods), semi-monthly (24, typically the 1st and 15th), biweekly (26, every two weeks), and weekly (52) are the most common schedules — biweekly and semi-monthly are easy to confuse but produce slightly different paycheck amounts.
Why biweekly pay sometimes gives 'extra' paychecks
Biweekly pay (26 periods) doesn't divide evenly into 12 months — some years produce 27 paychecks instead of 26 for people paid this way, which is why biweekly paychecks are usually smaller individually than semi-monthly ones, even for the same annual salary.