How USPS Pay Periods Work
Every USPS pay period runs exactly two weeks, Saturday through Friday, and your paycheck lands on the Friday after the period closes — so the money you earn in, say, PP16 (July 11–24) arrives July 31. That one-week lag trips up nearly every new hire: your first check reflects your first pay period, not your first week. If you’re new, our first 90 days guide covers what else to expect.
Why 2026 Has 27 Pay Periods
A calendar year holds 52 weeks plus one or two extra days. Those extra days accumulate, and every 11 years or so the postal calendar absorbs them by fitting 27 pay periods into a single leave year instead of 26 — and 2026 is that year, per Postal Bulletin 22692. Practically, that means one extra paycheck. But there’s a catch worth planning for: deductions set as a fixed dollar amount per pay period (TSP contributions, allotments) will be taken 27 times, not 26. If you’re pacing a TSP contribution to land exactly on the $23,500 annual limit, do the math on 27 checks or you’ll hit the ceiling early and lose matching contributions in the final periods.
Leave Year vs. Calendar Year
The leave year doesn’t match the calendar year, and this is the detail that catches people at carryover time. The 2026 leave year began January 10, 2026 (the start of PP03) and runs through early January 2027. Your annual leave carryover cap — 520 hours for bargaining unit employees under the current MOU, 640 for EAS — is enforced at the end of the leave year, not on December 31. Use the leave calculator to see whether your balance will clear the cap. Tax withholding, on the other hand, follows the calendar year: your W-2 reflects checks paid in 2026, regardless of when the hours were worked. Our W-2 and taxes guide explains why your W-2 box 1 never matches your annual salary.
Holidays and Your Check
The table above maps each of the ten federal holidays (plus observed dates) to its pay period. If you work a holiday, you earn holiday worked pay — effectively double time — on top of your regular holiday leave pay. That’s one of the best-paying days on the postal calendar, and you can model exactly what it adds with the take-home pay calculator. Note that when a holiday falls on your non-scheduled day or a Sunday, the observed date shifts, which changes which pay period it lands in — the table above already accounts for that.
Verify Against Official Sources
Pay dates occasionally shift when a payday collides with a bank holiday, and your local finance office is the final authority. This calendar matches the published 2026 schedule; for the deeper story on how the 27-period year affects your annual pay, see our full 2026 pay period calendar guide.