That's very surprising to me. In case I wasn't clear, I'm referring specifically to salaried pay and not hourly pay, where more frequent payouts are the norm.
Admittedly, I only have my own anecdotal evidence among my own experiences, friends, and family, but I can't think of anyone I've had the salary conversation with that mentioned getting paid other than monthly and would be curious to see what the actual breakdown is in the US.
Edit: This [1] article states that 59% of the US workforce is hourly, so it's accurate to say that bi-weekly is the most common frequency among all jobs in the US, but I can't find any resources that focus on the breakdown specifically among salaried workers.
This BLS breakdown [1] doesn't break down salaried vs. hourly. However, it does say that "A look at the chart reveals that semimonthly is the pay period in which businesses pay the highest average hourly earnings, followed closely by monthly." (And biweekly after that.) Hourly earnings are probably a reasonable proxy for salaried vs. hourly.
So the data suggests that being paid every two weeks is somewhat more common than monthly. (And, for larger businesses, biweekly is overwhelmingly the norm.)
Thanks for the followup, this puts a lot in perspective. The article notes:
> In March 2013, 94.8 percent of private businesses were single-pay-period businesses
meaning that most companies pay all workers on the same schedule. Therefore, if a company has any hourly workers that get paid more frequently than monthly, everyone salaried in the company is going to get put in the same pay schedule as well. All the orgs I've worked at either paid monthly uniformly or were part of that rare 5.2% that had different pay schedules, so I admit that my experience is an outlier here.
The other interesting thing about the numbers is that biweekly becomes much more prevalent relative to semimonthly as the businesses get larger.
I assume this is because small businesses (and many employees) prefer a pay schedule that's aligned with their (often monthly ) bills for cash flow reasons. Whereas larger businesses prefer to keep payroll expenses from fluctuating a bit depending upon how many days are in a given month.
Admittedly, I only have my own anecdotal evidence among my own experiences, friends, and family, but I can't think of anyone I've had the salary conversation with that mentioned getting paid other than monthly and would be curious to see what the actual breakdown is in the US.
Edit: This [1] article states that 59% of the US workforce is hourly, so it's accurate to say that bi-weekly is the most common frequency among all jobs in the US, but I can't find any resources that focus on the breakdown specifically among salaried workers.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-americans-are-hourly-worke...