Weekly Paychecks

In some of the [many] threads about the US budget deficit, and others about finance generally I see reference to’ paychecks’. I also see people talking about ‘weekly paychecks’.

In the US, is it common or even normal, to pay wages with a cheque? Is it common for people to be paid weekly?

Here in the UK, it is pretty rare to be paid weekly and vanishingly rare to be paid any other way than directly into a bank account.

Depends. I’ve been paid monthly, twice a month, and every other week before, in my 20+ years of working (here in the US). It wouldn’t surprise me if some people were paid weekly.

I’ve also done Direct Deposit (our phrase for paychecks going straight into a bank account) for well over a decade, but some people don’t have bank accounts due to shitty credit history/not trusting banks/etc. I think lots of people just refer to “paychecks” even if they aren’t physically getting a check any longer.

We call it a paycheck regardless of the form of payment. I think you guys use “pay packet” for the same meaning.

Most people are paid either every two weeks or once a month. However, it’s not uncommon to pay weekly, especially with businesses that employ lower-income workers with flexible schedules (retail, restaurants, construction, etc.) - I’ve even seen businesses that pay salaried management once a month, but the hourly workers every week.

One reason for this has to do with overtime laws. If you use a weekly pay period, it’s immediately obvious when a worker exceeds the 40 hours and is now owed overtime pay. If you use a two-week period, someone who worked 80 hours in that two-week period might have been split 40/40 (no overtime) or 45/35 (5 hours of overtime).

Temp here - I get paid weekly. As long as I’ve been a temp, I’ve been paid weekly. Have direct deposit at this assignment - in other assignments, that hasn’t been an option so I’d have to wait for the physical check to arrive in the mail.

At my current job working for an engineering staffing firm I’m paid weekly, though as far as I can remember at every other (white collar-type) job I’ve ever had I’ve been paid every other week…direct deposit for me, though I suppose if I really wanted to I could get mailed a check instead.

When I was an hourly worker at a newspaper we were paid weekly, too. I opted not to set up direct deposit, simply because my bank was literally across the street and it gave me an excuse to get away from my desk for a few moments. :slight_smile:

Most common IME: every other week, paid via direct deposit (rather than a physical paper check). We still ***call ***it a check, and we don’t mess around with extra consonants, either!

My husband still gets a weekly paycheck. He tried around 9 months ago to get the company to start direct depositing when I was particularly ill and wasn’t able to make the drive some weeks to physically drive to the bank to deposit, but it was a no go. Keep in mind his uncle owns the company, so it’s not a mega corporation, but still a multi million dollar company. It’s like they are stuck in the 1980’s and refuse to budge ! lol.

I would think direct deposit would be simple, or am I wrong? They claimed it was just too complicated and as my husband had asked many of the other employees what they thought of it, and they were ALL for it, I can’t understand why it’s so complicated to them.

Actually for us, thankfully we don’t actually live paycheck to paycheck, we could go feasibly a month ( for some reason, they date their paychecks where they must be cashed within 30 days) but my son also works there, and unfortunately he hasn’t listened to his parents yet. He tends to live paycheck to paycheck and I do have to deposit his paycheck too , since they work out of town quite a bit . It’s a construction company.

Is it really that hard for a company to set up direct deposit? I ask because I honestly have no idea, but everyone I know gets paid by direct deposit, and they simply handle things online, transfers, getting cash out by atm, etc… just curious… TIA for any answers on this, I’ve been wondering…

I’m really concerned because I think I’ve posted before if not more than once, I have kidney disease with a really not so great outlook so I worry about they day that I won’t be able to do this for them, and here they are trying to work.They must work, someone’s gotta with such a costly disease :wink: … I have no idea then what’s going to happen. At that time, it was really rough. I was going through a really bad period but I know it’s going to come up again soon. That’s just being realistic. I wish I could think of a great talking point for getting them on board … but alas, I don’t own the company … :slight_smile:

In answer to general question, the other thing is, a lot of people I know get paid twice a month or monthly, so it’s very rare except for lower paying jobs around here to get paid weekly I think… Just my observation…

I worked at a company for a few years that paid by cheque. I think it was partly a power thing - to withhold the final cheque until the expensive custom keys and any equipment were returned, etc.

Basically, it’s a trade-off. if you can do the proper book-keeping yourself, the only expense is bookkeeper time and per-cheque charge. Most banks in Canada want to do the payroll service, rather than allow you to send them a file of deposits to process. (although online banking is getting more sophisticated).

So let’s say they charge you a few dollars per employee per month for a payroll service, as I dealt with over 10 years ago. If you deal with say, 50 employees, it costs you a couple of hundred dollars a month, and you still have to deliver work hours or whatever to them. they take care of caculating income tax etc. deducted, government remittances, filing the necessary reports (automatically with a computer program)…

If you’re a chap bastard and payroll is simple, you can make a few hundred extra profit by doing it yourself.

If they’re not using a major payroll service, they may have virtually no way to do the direct deposit even if they wanted to. Having a service like that probably runs $1000-1500/year.

If someone is already using a major payroll service or software, direct deposit would be very simple to set up. There are usually additional fees per check - $1.50 is pretty common. There is a little hassle collecting the right information; probably 15% of employees will give you the wrong numbers and blame you when the paycheck doesn’t arrive on time.

Very few employers can eliminate checks entirely. An awful lot of people are so low on the credit rating scale that they don’t have an account to direct deposit to. So it might be a convenience to handle every paycheck the same way.

Either way, the answer is probably that they don’t offer it because they’re trying save a couple of bucks. Alternatively, the owner is one of those people who is still not sure why typewriters have been replaced with these new-fangled computer things.

If you’re a small enough company, a payroll service isn’t feasible, and it’s very hard, if not virtually impossible to do direct deposit without one.

My husband gets paid via actual check (fun note - he’s the shop foreman, so he occasionally signs his own paycheck).

I get paid direct deposit, but I still refer to a “paycheck” - and I figure most people do refer to it that way.

As far as pay-period breakdowns, here’s what I’ve personally encountered:

Paid daily - contract work, work “under the table” (I was a kid, I didn’t know any better)
Paid weekly - hourly shift work at fast food or waitstaff work
Paid every-two-weeks - ditto, and what I figure is the most common arrangement.
Paid twice a month (note that this isn’t QUITE the same as the immediately previous) - at least two different government jobs - plays merry hell with the accounting, but at least you know exactly when your check drops vis-a-vis the day of the month.
Paid monthly - contract work
Paid every-two-months - contract work, and the suckiest option IMO. I can budget with the best of them, but getting a fat wad at the top of a month and then going without for 60 days is a bit rough.

I make a solid middle class salaried income and am paid weekly. But my company has a lot of hourly workers (I work for a landscape company) and so I assume they just run our office staff payroll at the same time as the laborer payroll.

I also have direct deposit but they still give me a voided check stub each week. I never really know what to do with them.

I assume your employer was giving you a voided check stub because that’s the part that details how much is going toward federal income taxes, state income taxes, FICA, Medicare, etc., each pay period. I used to get a paper check stub with such information but for the past ten years or so, this information has been provided electronically. One employer let us login to a webpage where the information was onscreen. My current employer emails the check stub in PDF format.

My company stopped giving paper checks a few years ago. If you don’t provide an account for direct deposit they pay you through a prepaid visa debit card that charges fees for everything. They won’t even give paper stubs anymore; you have to sign up through a third party website to view them.

I’m a Temp. I get paid weekly by direct deposit. Previously I was usually paid biweekly.

And companies are now being sued for doing this.

On my last two jobs I was paid weekly. On my current job it is every 2 weeks.

Technically speaking, the default is to be paid by check, but the vast majority of workers elect for direct deposit.

Back a couple of years ago after my bankruptcy, I couldn’t have a checking account for a full year. I got a paper paycheck and had to deal with a check cashing place (and their fees).

In Australia. I’ve had my wages direct deposited since the 80’s, always been paid fortnightly.

I don’t recall ever being paid by cheque, prior to the direct deposit I was being paid in cash, but I do know a lot of people who resisted the direct deposit and stayed on cheque payments into the 90’s.

The “check stub” people have referred to is called a 'Pay Slip" here and it’s a legal requirement to provide one. It details how much you earned, what was basic pay, what was overtime or allowances, how much tax and other deductions were taken out, how much super, etc.

Where I am now we still provide a paper payslip for those who want it but are pushing the option where you receive it via email.

Oh, I know. I just feel as though I shouldn’t throw it away but I never use it either aside from an initial glance and so they just build up.

Some folks have said that the lower paid employees are the only ones that get paid weekly. IME, this does not hold true. One of my highest paid positions was paid weekly in CASH!! 100 dollar bills no less. I got a pay stub in the envolope with the $$!

Like many before me, I have been paid by the job, (often twice a day), daily, weekly, twice a month, every two weeks, and monthly. I drew the line at every two months. Right now I am paid every two weeks in CASH. My part time job I get paid weekly by check. Odd jobs I often work out a trade for some merchandise, services, or materials. I pay taxes on all of it. I Do not want to upset Uncle Sugar!

purplehorseshoe, Please note cheque has one less consonant and two more vowels then check. Thanks to Danial Webster! IHTH, 48.

I’ve had jobs where I’ve been paid weekly and jobs where I’ve been paid every two weeks. I’ve also been paid twice a month. Once on the 15th of the month and once on the last day. I know there’s little difference between the two, except if you’re paid every two weeks, you get 26 paychecks a year, and twice monthly, you get 24 checks a year. I’m sure it saves the payroll department a little money to do twice a month.

At my first full-time job (1989-1996), our company paid us every Friday. That was considered to be fairly unusual, even at that time, for a Fortune 500 company (which we were), but it was largely a legacy of the company’s owners being very loyal to the employees in our manufacturing plant, and believing that weekly paychecks were appreciated by those workers. The company was sold shortly before I left in '96 to a major international consumer-goods company, and the weekly paychecks were a thing of the past soon after.

At the three jobs I’ve had since then, we’ve had bi-monthly paydays (the 15th of the month, and the last day of the month).

I worked at a big ad agency up until two years ago. They really pushed direct deposit, to the point where, by 6 or 7 years ago, they would only pay you via direct deposit, and it was extremely difficult to get paid via an actual, paper check, and even our payslips / check stubs were only distributed electronically.

However, I’m now employed at a much smaller company, and we do not have direct deposit at all, which I think is very much outside the norm these days for a professional-services company (with sales in the millions) like us. Paychecks are distributed by hand at 2pm on payday. The owner says that he feels his employees have a greater understanding of the relationship between their work and their compensation when they get an actual check, but I have to believe that benefiting from a day or two of float is part of his reason, too.