Help! Semi-monthly payroll; vacation & sick time

mstechphr

We have a semi-monthly pay period. Our salaried exempt ee's are paid for 86.6667 hours each payroll; Over the 24 pay periods in the year that works out to 2,080 hours. The payroll on the 10th of each month covers the time worked during the 16th-end of previous month; and the 26th payroll covers the 1st-15th of the month.

Here is the question that has come up recently: If a salaried, exempt ee is out on paid sick leave, we put through 80 sick hours and 6.6667 regular hours and this way their pay check will always be the same amount. But in this upcoming payroll, they will actually miss 11 days of work, or 88 hours of sick time. Would you still put through 80 hours sick and 6.6667 regular hours or how do you handle these differences/irregularities for salaried employees? For employees who are out on extended leave using sick or vacation time, this makes a difference! Can we base our salary on 8 hour days? Or does it have to be weekly? I can't find anything in the DOL website or Wage & Hour laws that address this specifically.

Don D

If they're salaried exempt, you're paying them a guaranteed wage, semi-monthly, for all hours worked in the pay period, whether many or few. So, they draw the same pay. It doesn't really matter internally how you want to cost it out.

Peyton Irby MS

i am not sure why the system would generate the paid hours as it does. the DOL does not require any particular type of internal bookkepping for exempt employees. you may want to consider manual notations or some advice to employees of the terms and effect of the leave policy.
Peyton Irby
Editor, Mississippi Employment Law Letter
Watkins Ludlam Winter & Stennis, P.A.
(601) 949-4810
[email]pirby@watkinsludlam.com[/email]

moneyman

Many years ago we used the 86.67 semi-monthly method, however, our salaried employees got paid a set $ amount each pay period. Since each pay period had anywhere from 10-12 days in it, we did not actually account for hours when paying out, just the calculated $ for that period. When they took vacation or sick time, we keyed it into the system as 8 hour days since that is the basis for the accrual. The system tracked it as a "memo" item only and did not use the hours to pay out. So, in the beginning of the year, they were given XX amount of hours and as the year went by, the system deducted from it for tracking purposes only.