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Total compensation is what's important, so long as the interval between payments isn't too long.

If you have to sweat the difference between being paid twice a month and every two weeks, you need to start saving yourself more of a cushion.

It's always easy for not-poor-people to say "just have more of a cushion."

Let's use an example. Assume $100,000 salary, pre-tax. Post-tax, let's assume your net salary is $74,000.

For being paid twice a month (15th and last day of the month), each pay check will be $3,000 (we're rounding up here). Each month you'll have $6,000 to spend.

For being paid every two weeks (every other Friday), each pay check will be $2770. Each month you'll have $5540 to spend ($460 less than the twice a month schedule). Except—two months out of the year, you'll get a third $2770 paycheck, giving you $8310 to spend in those two months.

It's just... weird. What's the difference? A car payment or a student loan payment or extra food or insurance premiums or parking or transit or anything you can spend $460/month on. Sure, to a well off person $460/month may not sound like much, but it adds up when it's taken out every month and only paid back in lump sums twice a year. (My entire point being: you can't form your monthly budget to include lump payments six months in the future.)

Honestly, if you're making $100k and this is something that you're thinking about, you're living paycheck to paycheck and you need to learn how to manage your money.

If you're making 100,000 salary, you're well off. Incidentally, I find it much simpler when I get paid once a month.

Getting paid once a month solves the entire problem.

The only reason this whole pay period thing matters is because bills (rent, car payment, insurance, utilities, iPhone bill) tend to be due monthly and not every two weeks.

It turns out you can dedupe most of your bills into one by paying them with a credit card. As long as the total amount stays under 4 weeks pay, there are zero timing issues and you get a month of float plus rewards (cash back, airline miles) for free.

$100k a year is not a "poor person" salary.

That might be a good strategy to spend more wisely, and save up the 'extra' money that comes up twice a year.

The two weeks is very American no one in a professional job in the Uk and Europe doesn't get a monthly salary.

Was coming to post the same thing, here in the uk the more regularly that you get paid, the simpler the job type. Nearly all salaried jobs are monthly, come temping and contracting is biweekly, and manual work is weekly or even daily in small scale construction or other manual work.

Create a monthly budget out of the guaranteed 2 paychecks a month, and consider the other 2 mini-bonuses?

That's exactly what happens. "Oh, look, May has an extra Friday. Looks like I'm getting a treadmill this month."

"Your total compensation is $80,000 per year" when they then mumble "That's a $45,000 base and a $35,000 bonus, paid out yearly at the end of your hire date anniversary."

And if that bonus isn't guaranteed, then you're not even getting that.

When do we get paid? Every two weeks or twice a month? Every two weeks means your pay is essentially reduced by two entire paychecks. With "twice a month" your paycheck is $NET_SALARY/24. With "every two weeks" your paycheck is $NET_SALARY/26, meaning two months out of the year, you'll get three pay checks. But--the rest of the year, your salary is essentially reduced by ($NET_SALARY/26 2). You can't create a monthly budget out of two pay checks you get twice a year, six months apart.*

Am I missing something there? To me, this is only a concern for someone living paycheck to paycheck and that generally doesn't seem to be an issue for software developers.