Salaried Employee Pay Stub: What to Include
What belongs on a salaried employee's pay stub: whether to show hours, how salary divides by 26 or 24, rounding drift, and prorating partial periods.
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Every guide to building a pay stub is secretly a guide to building an hourly one. Hours times rate, overtime past 40, sign here. A salaried stub has no hours to multiply, and that one missing column changes the whole document.
The first decision is whether to print hours at all. The answer depends on a word most people use loosely: “salaried” and “exempt” are not synonyms. One describes how you pay someone. The other describes whether you owe them overtime. Build the stub on the wrong one and the stub becomes the written record of the mistake.
Everything here is about W-2 employees on a salary. If you are paying a contractor or taking owner distributions, the document works differently and the classification guide is a better place to start.
Salaried is not the same as exempt
An employee is exempt from overtime only if they pass three separate tests. Search results routinely blur the first two. Keep them apart.
The salary level test (29 CFR 541.600(a)) sets a floor of $684 per week. Subsection (b) of the same section spells out the equivalents: $1,368 biweekly, $1,482 semimonthly, $2,964 monthly. Annualized, $684 a week is $35,568. Up to ten percent of that required amount can come from nondiscretionary bonuses, incentives, and commissions paid annually or more often, per 541.602(a)(3).
The salary basis test (29 CFR 541.602(a)) is about the shape of the payment, not the size. The employee has to receive, each pay period on a weekly or less frequent basis, a predetermined amount “not subject to reduction because of variations in the quality or quantity of the work performed.”
The duties test is the third leg: executive, administrative, professional, computer, or outside sales work as the regulations define it. Job titles do not decide this. Actual duties do.
All three have to be satisfied. Miss any one and you have a salaried non-exempt employee: still on a salary, still owed overtime past 40 hours in a workweek. That quadrant is where most stub mistakes live, and it gets its own section below.
One 2026 note, because it caused real confusion. The 2024 rule that would have pushed the threshold to $1,128 a week was vacated in November 2024, and on May 15, 2026 the Department of Labor published a technical amendment formally restoring the pre-2024 regulatory text. $684 is the operative federal number. If you reclassified someone in 2024 and never revisited it, you may be building the wrong stub type for them.
Several states set exempt salary floors well above the federal figure, and where they do, the higher number governs. Check your own state before relying on $684, and see the state-by-state pay stub requirements for what your wage statement has to show on top of that.
What goes on a salaried pay stub, field by field
The right two columns are where salaried stubs diverge from each other.
| Field | Exempt salaried | Salaried non-exempt |
|---|---|---|
| Employer legal name and address | Required | Required |
| Employee name, last four of SSN or employee ID | Required | Required |
| Pay period start and end dates, pay date | Required | Required |
| Gross earnings for the period | Required | Required |
| Hours worked | Not required | Required |
| Hourly or regular rate | Not required | Required |
| Overtime line | Should not exist | Required past 40 hours in a workweek |
| Itemized deductions (tax, pre-tax, post-tax) | Required | Required |
| Net pay | Required | Required |
| Year-to-date columns | Standard practice | Standard practice |
The hours carve-out is real, and it is written down. Federal recordkeeping at 29 CFR 516.3 requires all the usual payroll records for bona fide executive, administrative, and professional employees except items (a)(6) through (a)(10), which are the hours-worked items. In their place it asks for “the basis on which wages are paid in sufficient detail to permit calculation for each pay period of the employee’s total remuneration.”
California, which has one of the strictest wage statement statutes in the country, makes the same carve-out. Labor Code 226(a) lists nine required items, and item (a)(2), total hours worked, applies “except as provided in subdivision (j).” Subdivision (j) exempts employees whose compensation is solely a salary and who are exempt from overtime. Getting the other eight items wrong is expensive: 226(e) sets $50 for an initial knowing and intentional violation, $100 per employee per subsequent period, capped at $4,000 in the aggregate, plus costs and fees.
So why do so many exempt stubs show hours anyway, usually 86.67 or 80? Because payroll systems print a nominal figure to drive PTO accrual or job costing. 2,080 annual hours divided by 24 semimonthly periods is 86.67. Divided by 26 biweekly periods it is 80. That is legal and optional. If you print it, print the same number every period. A nominal hours figure that wobbles week to week on an exempt stub hands someone the argument that the pay tracks quantity of work, which is precisely what the salary basis test says it must not do.
In Payslip44 that distinction is the earning line type. An exempt stub uses a flat Amount line with no hours attached. A salaried non-exempt stub uses an Hours plus Rate line with a separate overtime line beneath it. Both carry year-to-date columns. The general build sequence is the same either way, and the walk-through for making a pay stub covers it.
Turning an annual salary into a per-check number
The divisors are not controversial: 52 weekly, 26 biweekly, 24 semimonthly, 12 monthly. What trips people up is everything downstream of the division.
Biweekly and semimonthly are not the same schedule. Biweekly is every other Friday, 26 checks, dates that drift through the month. Semimonthly is the 15th and the last day, 24 checks, dates that never move. Same annual salary, different per-check amount, and a different number of checks in a year. People confuse them constantly, and the confusion shows up as “my paycheck looks wrong.”
The quotient almost never lands on a whole cent, and almost nobody writes about it. Take $85,000 a year, paid biweekly. $85,000 divided by 26 is $3,269.230769 and onward. Pay $3,269.23 twenty-six times and you have paid $84,999.98, two cents short of the salary in the offer letter. Round the other way to $3,269.24 and you have paid $85,000.24. Semimonthly does the same thing in the opposite direction: $85,000 divided by 24 is $3,541.666, and 24 checks at $3,541.67 total $85,000.08.
Two standard fixes. Round every check to the cent and true up the difference on the final check of the year, or carry the running fraction forward and let it settle itself. Either is defensible. What is not defensible is a stub whose year-to-date column disagrees with the sum of the checks you actually issued, because that column is the number a lender, a caseworker, or a W-2 reconciliation will test. The year-to-date explainer covers what those columns are supposed to prove.
Software makes this worse than the arithmetic suggests. Money stored as a floating-point number accumulates tiny binary representation errors, and across 26 additions those errors surface in a year-to-date total that no longer ties to the stubs. Payslip44 does its money math with decimal arithmetic for exactly this reason.
Semimonthly pay creates an illusion of its own. The checks are identical in dollars but cover different numbers of workdays. A 1st-to-15th period might hold 10 workdays in one month and 12 in the next. Salaried employees read the long stretch as being underpaid. They are not. The pay period dates on the stub are the thing that explains it, which is a small argument for never omitting them.
2026’s 27th payday. Twenty-six biweekly periods cover 364 days, one short of a calendar year, so the extra day compounds until a 27th payday lands, every 11 or 12 years. In 2026 that means employers whose first payday fell on January 1, and employers whose first payday fell on January 2, because their 27th payday would otherwise land on New Year’s Day 2027 and typically gets paid early on December 31, 2026. It is a wrinkle covered in detail by Littler and Fisher Phillips. This is schedule-dependent, not a universal fact about the year: check your own calendar.
You have two choices, and one of them has a trap. Keep dividing by 26 and treat the extra check as additional compensation, or divide by 27 and shrink every check. If you divide by 27, verify the weekly equivalent still clears the salary threshold first. A $36,500 salary divided by 26 is $1,403.85 a check, comfortably above the $1,368 biweekly minimum. Divided by 27 it is $1,351.85, which is below it, and the employee is no longer exempt. Decide separately how benefit deductions handle the extra period, since most premiums are budgeted across 24 or 26.
For what happens to that gross figure once withholding starts, see gross to net pay.
Prorating a partial pay period
New hire starting on the 8th. Termination mid-period. An unpaid leave of absence. This is the most common salaried stub question and the one most guides answer with a formula and no authority.
The authority is 29 CFR 541.602(b)(6): an employer “may pay a proportionate part of an employee’s full salary for the time actually worked in the first and last week of employment” without breaking the salary basis. Subsection (b)(7) extends the same treatment to unpaid FMLA leave, with the regulation’s own example being a four-hour FMLA absence in a 40-hour week costing 10 percent of that week’s salary.
What the regulation does not do is pick a method. Three are in common use, and they give different answers. Take a semimonthly employee at $78,000 a year, so $3,250 a period, starting partway through a 15-day period that contains 11 scheduled workdays. She is employed for 10 calendar days and works 8 of them.
| Method | Calculation | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Calendar day | $3,250 / 15 days x 10 days | $2,166.67 |
| Workday | $3,250 / 11 days x 8 days | $2,363.64 |
| Fixed annual day | $78,000 / 260 days x 8 days | $2,400.00 |
Same salary, same start date, a $233 spread. None of them is wrong. The workday method is the most common because it matches how people think about a start date. The fixed annual day method (annual salary divided by 260 workdays, or by 2,080 hours) produces a stable daily rate that does not swing with the length of the period. Pick one, write it into your payroll policy, and apply it to everyone.
Then show your work on the stub. Label the earning line “Salary (prorated, 8 of 11 days)” rather than quietly printing a smaller number. The employee’s first question is always “why is this less,” and the earning line should answer it before they have to ask. In Payslip44 that is an Amount line with a custom label, or a separate adjustment line for the difference.
Mid-period raises follow the same logic. Two earning lines, the old rate and the new rate, each with its own day count and its own label. One blended number that matches neither rate is how a routine raise turns into a support ticket. A stub that is already out the door with the wrong figure is fixable, and the pay stub error guide covers the reissue.
Deductions that break the exemption
This section is worth reading twice. A pay stub is dated, itemized, written evidence of your payroll practice, and in an exemption dispute it is the exhibit.
Section 541.602(a) says the predetermined salary is not subject to reduction because of variations in the quality or quantity of work. An exempt employee who performs any work in a workweek is generally owed the full week’s salary. Only seven exceptions are permitted, and they run in the order 541.602(b)(1) through (b)(7):
- Full-day absences for personal reasons other than sickness or disability
- Full-day absences for sickness or disability under a bona fide plan, policy, or practice
- Offsets for jury fees, witness fees, or military pay
- Good-faith penalties for infractions of safety rules of major significance
- Unpaid disciplinary suspensions of one or more full days under a written policy
- A proportionate part of the salary in the first and last week of employment
- Unpaid FMLA leave
Notice how many of those say “full day.” That is the trap. An employee absent a day and a half can be docked for the one full day only. An employee who leaves two hours early can be docked nothing at all. Charging that time against an accrued PTO bank is a separate question from reducing salary, and the two get conflated constantly.
The consequence of getting it wrong is not proportional to the mistake. Under 29 CFR 541.603, an employer with an “actual practice” of improper deductions loses the exemption for all employees in the same job classification working for the same managers responsible for the deductions, for the whole period the deductions were made. That is retroactive overtime liability for a group, not a refund to one person. Courts weigh the number of improper deductions, the time span, how many employees and managers were involved, and whether a written policy exists.
There is a safe harbor at 541.603(d). An employer with a clearly communicated written policy prohibiting improper deductions, including a complaint mechanism, that reimburses employees promptly and commits in good faith to future compliance keeps the exemption. It fails only if the employer willfully keeps deducting after receiving complaints. If you find an improper deduction on stubs you have already issued, reimburse it and reissue the stub.
Salaried non-exempt: the stub most employers get wrong
A salary does not eliminate overtime. If the duties test or the salary level test fails, the employee is non-exempt, and every hour past 40 in a workweek is owed at one and a half times the regular rate. The salary just becomes the thing you derive that rate from.
29 CFR 778.113 gives the derivation: divide the salary by the number of hours it is intended to compensate. Salaries paid for periods other than a workweek have to be converted first. Multiply a monthly salary by 12 and divide by 52. Multiply a semimonthly salary by 24 and divide by 52. The regulation’s own example: $1,560 a month, or $780 semimonthly, for a 40-hour week works out to $360 a week and a $9.00 regular rate.
That changes three things on the stub. Hours become required rather than optional. A rate has to be shown or at least derivable from what is shown. And overtime needs its own line, so the half-time premium is visible instead of buried in a single gross figure.
Watch the regular rate itself, too. Nondiscretionary bonuses and commissions paid during the period raise it, which means the overtime rate for that period is higher than the base salary alone suggests. Bonuses and commissions on a pay stub goes through how those lines sit alongside regular earnings.
Leave balances belong on both kinds of salaried stub. Accrued, used, and remaining rows are how a salaried stub communicates time off when it shows no hours worked, and they answer the question employees actually open the stub to check.
The short version
A salaried stub is simpler than an hourly one. One earning line instead of five, no timecard to reconcile. That simplicity is exactly why the decisions behind it go undocumented, and why they get made differently every time somebody new runs payroll.
Settle four things once and write them down. Which divisor you use and how you handle the leftover cents. Which proration method applies to partial periods. Whether nominal hours print on exempt stubs. Whether each salaried employee is exempt or non-exempt, because the layout follows from that answer and nothing else.
Payslip44 builds both shapes on-device: flat amount lines for exempt salary, hours plus rate with a separate overtime line for salaried non-exempt, reusable employer and employee records so you are not retyping details every period, decimal-precise math so year-to-date ties to the checks you issued, and export to PDF, PNG, CSV, or text. Download it and set your salaried stubs up once.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Do salaried employees get pay stubs?
Yes, wherever state law requires a wage statement, and it is standard practice everywhere else. Federal law does not mandate the stub itself, but most states do, and the requirements are the same for salaried and hourly workers except for the hours column.
Does a salaried employee's pay stub have to show hours worked?
Not for exempt salaried employees. Federal recordkeeping at 29 CFR 516.3 drops the hours-worked items for bona fide executive, administrative, and professional employees, and California's Labor Code 226 carves them out too. Salaried non-exempt employees are a different story: hours are required.
Why does my salaried pay stub show hours like 86.67?
Many payroll systems print a nominal hours figure for exempt employees to drive PTO accrual or job costing. 86.67 is 2,080 annual hours divided by 24 semimonthly periods, and 80 is the biweekly equivalent. It is optional, not a sign your pay is hourly.
How do you calculate a salaried employee's gross pay per period?
Divide the annual salary by the number of pay periods: 52 weekly, 26 biweekly, 24 semimonthly, 12 monthly. The quotient rarely lands on an even cent, so decide up front whether you round every check and true up at year end or carry the fraction forward.
Can an employer dock a salaried employee's pay?
Only in the situations listed at 29 CFR 541.602(b): full-day personal absences, full-day sickness absences under a bona fide plan, jury or military pay offsets, major safety-rule penalties, full-day disciplinary suspensions under a written policy, unpaid FMLA leave, and the first and last weeks of employment. Partial-day docking is not on that list.
What happens if my employer makes an improper deduction from my salary?
If there is an actual practice of it, the employer loses the overtime exemption for everyone in the same job classification working for the same managers during that period, which means retroactive overtime. An employer with a clearly communicated written policy that reimburses promptly keeps the exemption under the 29 CFR 541.603(d) safe harbor.
How do you prorate salary for a partial pay period?
Pick a method and apply it consistently: calendar days in the period, scheduled workdays in the period, or a fixed annual daily rate such as salary divided by 260. 29 CFR 541.602(b)(6) lets you pay a proportionate part of the salary for the first and last weeks of employment without breaking the salary basis. Label the prorated line on the stub.
What is the minimum salary for an exempt employee in 2026?
$684 per week under federal law at 29 CFR 541.600(a), restored by a DOL technical amendment published May 15, 2026 after the 2024 rule was vacated. Several states set higher floors, and where they do, the higher number governs.