When days become minutes: Payroll becomes on-demand

🕧 2 min

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly half of Americans are paid on a biweekly schedule, an outdated routine that was born nearly 80 years ago when the U.S. government needed a way to efficiently collect payroll taxes. That process was automated long ago, but the lagged schedule for getting people paid has remained. It’s not just the U.S. that deals with delayed payment routines either: Countries from Japan to France to Kenya deal with monthly pay cycles, so that workers are often left to budget 30 days’ worth of expenses with one paycheck