Payroll Calendar 2027: Paydays, Bank Holidays, Deadlines

2027 is one of the awkward payroll years. It starts on a Friday, which means it contains 53 Fridays, and the first of them is a Federal Reserve holiday. A company that pays every other Friday and has a payday on January 1 gets 27 paychecks in the year instead of 26, and the first one cannot land on the date printed on the schedule because the banks are closed. Semimonthly employers have their own version of the problem: six of the 24 standard pay dates fall on a weekend and one, February 15, falls on Presidents Day.

This page does the arithmetic once so you do not have to. The generator below produces the full list of 2027 pay dates for any weekly, biweekly, semimonthly or monthly schedule, moves each one off weekends and bank holidays by the rule you choose, and tells you the last banking day to submit the ACH file for each. Below it are the Federal Reserve holidays, the quarter ends and filing deadlines, the two daylight saving changes, and the decisions a payroll team has to make before the first run of the year. For how many pay periods each schedule has in a normal year, see pay periods in a year; for the law on how often you must pay, see pay frequency laws by state.

2027 pay date generator

Choose your schedule and how you handle a payday that lands on a weekend or bank holiday. The list shows every 2027 payday, the date it moves to, why it moved, and the last day to submit a standard two-day ACH file. Nothing typed here leaves your browser.

Federal Reserve holidays in 2027

Direct deposit runs through the Automated Clearing House network, which settles only on days the Federal Reserve is open. A payday that falls on one of these dates cannot settle that day, and a payday one or two banking days after one needs the file submitted earlier than usual. The Federal Reserve observes a holiday that falls on a Sunday on the following Monday, and does not observe one that falls on a Saturday on the Friday before. That rule produces two of the year's surprises: Independence Day, a Sunday, is observed on Monday, July 5, and Christmas Day, a Saturday, is not observed at all by the banks, even though federal employees get Friday, December 24 off.

State governments observe additional days (Texas, for example, closes for Confederate Heroes Day in January and Massachusetts for Patriots' Day in April), but state holidays do not close the ACH network. Only the Federal Reserve calendar matters for whether money moves.

Biweekly schedules: 26 or 27 paydays

A year has 52 weeks and one day, or two days in a leap year. Every year therefore has one weekday that occurs 53 times, and in 2027 that weekday is Friday, because the year begins and ends on one. A biweekly schedule paid on Fridays catches 27 of those 53 Fridays if its first payday is January 1, and 26 if the first payday is January 8. Nothing about the schedule changed; the calendar simply handed one group of employers an extra pay date.

The 27-payday year is a salary question, not an hourly one. Hourly employees are paid for hours worked, and 27 checks simply means the pay periods line up so that the year's hours land in 27 envelopes. For salaried employees, an employer that divides annual salary by 26 and pays that amount 27 times pays one extra check, about 3.85 percent of annual salary, in 2027. The three lawful ways to handle it, and the trap in each, are covered in the 27th paycheck section of our pay periods guide. The short version: dividing by 27 so that each check is smaller is legal if offer letters state an annual salary and the change is announced in advance, but it pushes an exempt employee's weekly pay down by 3.7 percent, which matters for anyone paid near the exempt salary threshold, and it is bitterly unpopular. Most employers pay the 27th check and budget for it.

The January 1 payday has a second consequence. Because the banks are closed, the money has to be made available either on Thursday, December 31, 2026 or on Monday, January 4, 2027. Wages are taxed in the year the employee could first get at them, so a payday moved to December 31 is 2026 income and belongs on the 2026 W-2, even though the pay period it covers may run into the new year. For a company whose 2026 biweekly Fridays began January 2, 2026, moving the January 1, 2027 check back to December 31 gives 2026 the 27th paycheck instead of 2027. Moving it forward to January 4 keeps it in 2027 but may breach a state payday-lag rule; California, for example, requires wages for the first half of a month to be paid by the 26th and for the second half by the 10th of the next month, which a one-business-day slip does not breach, but New York's seven-day rule for manual workers can be tighter. Decide in November, tell employees in writing, and set the payroll system's holiday rule to match.

Semimonthly and monthly dates that move

A 15th-and-last-day schedule always has 24 paydays, but in 2027 seven of them fall on a day the banks are closed. Under the common "pay the banking day before" rule they move as follows. A 1st-and-15th schedule has a similar list, with January 1 (Friday holiday), May 1 (Saturday), August 1 (Sunday), August 15 (Sunday), February 15 (Presidents Day) and May 15 (Saturday) moving.

"Next banking day" is cheaper for cash flow and simpler for accruals, since the pay stays in the month it belongs to, but it is the riskier choice legally. Several states set a maximum gap between the end of a pay period and the payday, and a payday that is already at the limit cannot slide later. Paying early never breaches a lag rule. The one case where early payment causes trouble is the year boundary, covered above, where December 31 pulls income into the earlier tax year. Monthly last-day schedules move on the same five weekend and holiday dates: January, February, May, July and October.

ACH lead times and the paydays at risk

Most payroll providers want the approved payroll two banking days before the pay date so the ACH file can be originated the day before settlement. Some offer one-day or same-day ACH for a fee. Whatever the lead, a holiday in the two days before a payday pulls the submission deadline forward, and the paydays most often missed are the ones after a holiday rather than on it, because the pay date itself looks normal on the calendar.

• Tuesday, January 19 and Wednesday, January 20. Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A two-day lead for Tuesday means the file is due Thursday, January 14.
• Tuesday, February 16 and Wednesday, February 17. Presidents Day on the Monday.
• Tuesday, June 1 and Wednesday, June 2. Memorial Day on the Monday.
• Friday, June 18. Juneteenth is a Friday this year, so it is a payday for weekly Friday schedules and for the 27-check biweekly schedule that began January 1. Pay Thursday, June 17 and submit by Tuesday, June 15.
• Tuesday, July 6 and Wednesday, July 7. Independence Day observed on Monday, July 5.
• Tuesday, September 7 and Wednesday, September 8. Labor Day.
• Tuesday, October 12 and Wednesday, October 13. Columbus Day, which many offices do not observe, so the holiday is easy to forget.
• Friday, November 12. A payday on the January 8 biweekly cadence. Veterans Day is Thursday, November 11. A two-day lead means the file is due Tuesday, November 9.
• Friday, November 26. The day after Thanksgiving. File due Tuesday, November 23, which is also the week many payroll staff take off.
• Friday, December 24 and Friday, December 31. Not Federal Reserve holidays, but many banks, payroll bureaus and the employees who approve payroll are away. December 31 is also the payday for the 27-check biweekly schedule and the day the 2027 books close.

Paper checks and pay cards have their own cutoffs, and a check dated on a holiday is a constructive-receipt problem only if the employee could not cash it; it is the deposit date that decides the tax year, not the check date. Build the submission dates into the payroll calendar the system sends to approvers rather than into a separate note that nobody opens in November.

Tax deposit and filing dates

Federal filing deadlines that fall on a Saturday, Sunday or legal holiday move to the next business day. 2027 moves several of them. The full year-end sequence, including state deadlines and the forms that changed, is in the year-end payroll checklist; these are the dates a payroll calendar needs.

Deposit dates follow the same weekend rule. Monthly depositors pay by the 15th of the following month, so the January 2027 deposit is due Tuesday, February 16 (the 15th is Presidents Day), the April deposit on Monday, May 17 (the 15th is a Saturday), the July deposit on Monday, August 16 and the October deposit on Monday, November 15. Semiweekly depositors have three banking days after each Wednesday-to-Friday or Saturday-to-Tuesday payday window, and a holiday inside the window adds a day. The $100,000 next-day rule does not move for anything: a payroll whose accumulated liability reaches $100,000 must be deposited by the next banking day regardless of schedule.

Daylight saving time and overnight shifts

Clocks go forward at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, March 14, 2027 and back at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, November 7, 2027, in every state except Hawaii and most of Arizona. An employee working an 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift that night works seven hours in March and nine in November. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act you pay the hours actually worked: seven in March, even if the schedule says eight, and nine in November, with the ninth hour counting toward weekly overtime and, in California, Alaska, Nevada and Colorado, toward daily overtime. Time clocks that record wall-clock times rather than durations will show a seven-hour or nine-hour punch pair automatically; systems that store a scheduled duration need a manual adjustment. Tell overnight supervisors in advance, because the November shift is the one that generates unexpected overtime and the March shift is the one that generates complaints about short pay.

Decisions to make before the first run

1. Which day the January 1 pay actually lands. December 31, 2026 or January 4, 2027. The first changes the 2026 W-2; the second must clear your states' payday-lag rules. Put the answer in writing to employees before mid-December.
2. How to treat the 27th check, if you have one. Pay it and budget about 3.85 percent extra for salaried staff, or divide by 27 and announce the smaller checks in advance. Check that no exempt employee drops below the salary threshold under the second option, and check benefit deductions: a flat per-check deduction taken 27 times over-collects, a per-check deduction that was set as annual premium divided by 26 collects one extra premium.
3. The weekend and holiday rule. "Banking day before" is safer under state lag laws; "next banking day" keeps pay in the right month. Pick one, set it in the payroll system, and make sure the printed calendar employees receive matches the system's behavior.
4. Submission deadlines, not just pay dates. Publish the ACH cutoff for every payday to the people who approve payroll, with the ten holiday-affected weeks highlighted. The approvals that get missed are the Tuesday after a Monday holiday and the Friday after Thanksgiving.
5. Accrual and leave balances. Paid sick leave and PTO that accrue per pay period accrue 27 times on a 27-check schedule unless the plan caps by hours or year. Check the plan text; most cap by hours and are unaffected, but a "per paycheck" plan over-accrues.
6. The two 23-hour and 25-hour nights. Brief overnight supervisors before March 14 and November 7.
7. Year-end. December 31, 2027 is a Friday and a payday for the 27-check schedule. Decide now whether the final 2027 payroll runs on Thursday, December 30 so that W-2 totals can be reconciled before the February 1, 2028 deadline... which, for once, is a Monday that does not move.

Key takeaways

• 2027 starts and ends on a Friday, so it has 53 Fridays. A biweekly Friday schedule with a January 1 payday has 27 paydays; one starting January 8 has 26. Weekly Friday schedules have 53.
• January 1 is a Federal Reserve holiday. Pay the January 1 check on Thursday, December 31, 2026 (which makes it 2026 income) or Monday, January 4, 2027 (which must clear state payday-lag rules).
• Seven of the 24 semimonthly 15th-and-last-day paydays fall on a weekend or holiday in 2027, including Presidents Day on February 15 and Memorial Day on May 31.
• Juneteenth falls on a Friday, so it is a payday for weekly Friday schedules and for the biweekly schedule that began January 1; pay June 17.
• Veterans Day and Thanksgiving are both Thursdays, so the Friday paydays of November 12 and 26 need ACH files submitted by the Tuesday before on a two-day lead.
• December 25 is a Saturday and the Federal Reserve does not observe it on Friday, December 24, but many banks and providers close; confirm before relying on the 24th.
• W-2, 1099-NEC, fourth-quarter 941 and 940 are due Monday, February 1, 2027; the second- and third-quarter 941s move to August 2 and November 1. Clocks change March 14 and November 7.