Here’s when each jurisdiction has to pay the extra money to employees and how much based on current payroll:
- 2024: Fairfield at a cost of $1.5 million.
- 2025: The estimated increase in Monroe is $675,000.
- 2026: Hamilton’s cost will be an estimated $2.4 million and Oxford $507,708.
- 2027: Butler County has the highest hit at around $4.27 million, Ross Twp. payroll is $43,925 and Trenton $225,000.
- 2032: Fairfield Twp. paychecks total $200,000, Middletown $1 million and West Chester Twp. around $600,000.
Monroe’s Finance Director Jake Burton explained the extra pay phenomenon.
“We pay bi-weekly so with that leap year at some point — it depends on which day you pay payroll on and all that stuff — at some point it will cycle through to where you have 27 bi-weekly pays in a calendar year versus the normal 26,” Burton said. “You get that extra day in there and it changes the calendar just slightly enough that at some point there will be an impact.”
Monroe is planning for their 27th payroll coming in 2025 now, “it definitely is an impact, it’s impacting all our operating budgets,” Burton said.
Next year, the city of Fairfield’s personnel related budgets — salary, pensions, Medicare tax and the like — will jump 3.85% just because of the extra $1.5 million payroll expense.
“The city has appropriately planned for the increase and the occurrence of an extra pay will in no way impact the ability to meet contractual and/or merit based wage increases in the coming year,” Fairfield Finance Director Chris Hacker told the Journal-News.
Since this is a once-a-decade or so occurrence, West Chester Twp. Finance Director Ken Keim said he missed planning for the extra payroll in 2020, because he thought the jump was scheduled for 2021.
“We planned for it to be in 2021 and then we got to the end 2020 and thought maybe we made a mistake it was in 2020,” Keim sad. “So we had to be reactive instead of planning. It wasn’t done very well, we made a mistake.”
He said the money they received in federal pandemic relief — that was allowed to be used for first responder salaries — helped cover the extra cost.
Trenton hasn’t experienced a 27th payroll before because they switched from weekly to bi-weekly paychecks in 2021. Finance Director Matthew Mesisklis said the calendar forced 53 paychecks instead of 52 every five years under that schedule.
“The whole calendar year is not divisible evenly into a number of weeks,” he said. “There’s always a couple days left over.”
He said while the amount of extra money needed for the 53rd pay week was less, they made the switch to bi-weekly because it is the global standard and is more efficient.
“We went to bi-weekly to save time on our payroll clerk, who also has other duties. It takes 2 to 3 days to generate and administer paychecks for all of the city employees, 2 to3 days every week means she was always working on payroll,” he said. “It has freed up her time to help modernize the office, automate other processes, and assist other staff.
The county obviously has the largest payroll by far and Jill Cole, the finance director for the auditor’s office said the last paychecks handed out on Oct. 13 amounted to $4.27 million. The last time the county had the 27th payroll was in 2016 when payroll amounted to nearly $3.5 million every two weeks.
Butler County Finance Director Dave McCormick said the extra paychecks don’t mean anyone is getting more money. However the way government finances work it does make a difference because they are on a cash basis.
“Nobody’s getting a pay raise, it simply means they have one more pay period in the current year and one pay period less than normal the next year,” McCormick said. “It’s seamless to employees because they’re getting their pay every two weeks... For a government it’s going to be more expense in that year when it occurs, but the next year they’re going to have less expense.”
About the Author
