The Payroll Book

CHAPTER 7Workweek, Pay Period, Payday

WORKWEEK

The federal government through the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) sets the standard workweek at 168 continuous hours. Seven consecutive 24-hour periods. This is a predefined period, and the employer can set when it starts. It can be from midnight Saturday to midnight Saturday or it can be 9:15 Monday morning to 9:15 Monday morning, but it must be seven days straight. This is so you can figure overtime mandated under the FLSA. We discuss overtime in detail in chapter 3.

Even if you pay every two weeks, you have to figure overtime for both of the 168-hour weeks separately.

If you pay your employees semimonthly, you make figuring overtime more difficult because you will have periods of time that can overlap at the beginning or end of a regular workweek. Say your workweek is from Sunday through Saturday but your pay period is the first of the month through the 15th and the 16th through the last day of the month.

Let's take the month of March 2019 as an example. March 16 (a Saturday) falls into the workweek of March 10 through March 16. Then, the next seven days into the workweek of March 17 through March 23, the following seven days into the workweek of March 24 through March 30 and then the 31st falls into the next workweek of March 31 through April 6. This means you have to keep looking forward and backward to see if there are more than 40 hours in a workweek that have to be paid as overtime in a pay period.

If you use a biweekly ...