Section 204 sets the paydays, and a late-payment log says why one slipped.
Labor Code §204 fixes when wages are due: two windows a month, seven days after the close of a weekly or biweekly period, and overtime by the next regular payday. Paydays slip in ordinary ways. Since the 2024 reform, whether a slip was willful or intentional decides one limb of a PAGA count, and the record that answers it is the one written on the day the payday slipped.
A grading contractor in Fresno pays its field crew every Friday for the week that closed the Saturday before. One week in September the bank rejects the payroll file. The file is fixed on Monday, and the crew is paid three days late.
Nobody in the office thinks of that as a violation. The crew was paid in full, the next week went out on time, and a weekly payroll feels as if it is always ahead of the law. Labor Code §204 does not measure how far ahead a payroll usually runs. It measures each payday, and that Monday fell outside its window.
Two windows, and a seven-day rule
Section 204 sets the deadlines in three pieces.
The semimonthly windows. Under §204(a), wages are due twice a month, on regular paydays the employer designates in advance. Work done from the 1st through the 15th is paid between the 16th and the 26th of the same month. Work done from the 16th through the last day of the month is paid between the 1st and the 10th of the next month.
Payrolls that run on a fixed period. Subdivision (d) gives a weekly, biweekly or semimonthly payroll its own test:
The requirements of this section shall be deemed satisfied by the payment of wages for weekly, biweekly, or semimonthly payroll if the wages are paid not more than seven calendar days following the close of the payroll period.
That is the rule the Fresno crew runs on. The week closed on a Saturday, so its wages were due by the next Saturday. Friday met the deadline. Monday missed it.
Overtime. Under §204(b)(1), wages for work beyond the normal work period are due no later than the payday for the next regular payroll period. Overtime gets one more cycle than straight time does, and that difference decides the second case below.
Three ordinary ways a payday slips
None of these takes bad faith. Each one is part of running a payroll.
The processing delay. A rejected bank file. A funding transfer that clears a day late. Timecards from a remote job that reach the office after the cutoff. The wages are paid in full, and late, for everyone on that run.
The correction held to the next check. A foreman's timecard drops six straight-time hours on a Thursday. Payroll finds it after the run and adds the hours to next week's check. Those six hours were due on the payday they missed, so the correction arrives on time for the next week and late for its own. If the missing hours were overtime, the next regular payday is the deadline §204(b)(1) already gives them. An off-cycle run inside the window avoids the question altogether. The payroll register shows which kind each correction was, line by line.
The incentive on its own schedule. A bonus or a commission paid monthly, at the close of a quarter, or when the customer pays. Logistics has a version of its own. A carrier that converted owner-operators to employees can keep paying per-load settlements on the monthly cycle the contractor agreements used, and a monthly cycle applied to employees often misses the semimonthly windows. When an incentive is earned is a question for the plan's own terms. When it is due once earned is a question for §204.
What a late payday costs, and who chooses the route
A late payday has its own penalty section. Under §210, an initial violation costs $100 for each failure to pay each employee. Each subsequent violation, and any willful or intentional one, costs $200 for each failure to pay each employee, plus 25 percent of the amount unlawfully withheld. Those are §210's own amounts. They are not PAGA figures, and nothing in this post multiplies them.
There are two routes to that penalty. Since AB 673 took effect in 2020, §210 lets an employee recover it in a hearing before the Labor Commissioner. The other route is PAGA. Under PAGA (Labor Code §2699), California's private-enforcement law, an aggrieved employee may pursue civil penalties, the amounts a court can award, on behalf of themselves and other current or former employees. An aggrieved employee — the one who may bring a PAGA action — is one who personally suffered each of the violations alleged (§2699(c)(1)). Under §210(c), an employee who takes the first route for a violation cannot also take the second for the same one. Which route a given employee takes, and how the penalty units count on either, are open questions, and they belong to your counsel.
The limb that turns on why
The 2024 reform added §2699(i). For a §204 violation, it bars collecting a PAGA civil penalty on top of the civil penalty for the underlying unpaid wage, unless the §204 violation was willful or intentional. The subdivision has its own post, and two points from it carry over.
On our reading of the text, the bar reaches only a late payday that rides on an unpaid wage. The Fresno crew was paid in full, three days late, and nothing was left unpaid underneath. A late payday like that is not derivative of anything, and on that reading it stands on its own. How a court reads it on your facts is a question for your counsel.
Where there is an unpaid wage underneath, "willful or intentional" is a fact question about the payroll practice. The §2699(i) post describes the difference between a late run with a dated cause written beside it and the same run with nothing written down. The rest of this post is about keeping the first kind.
The late-payment log
The payroll calendar and the bank records show that a payday was late. Only a log shows why. One entry, written the day the slip is found, holds five things:
The payday that was due, and the date the wages were paid.
Who was affected: the whole run, one crew, or the named employees.
The cause, in one sentence. A rejected file, timecards in after the cutoff, a correction found after the run.
The fix: the off-cycle run and its date, or the change made so it does not happen again.
Who wrote the entry, and when.
Three records sit beside it. The payroll calendar, designated in advance, which is the schedule §204(a) measures against. The actual pay dates, from the settlement records for direct deposit and the check register for paper. And the off-cycle run register, which shows every correction paid between regular paydays. Laid side by side, the four records answer the questions the windows ask: when each payday was due, when it was paid, and what was written down when the two did not match.
None of this is new work. A payroll operation already produces every one of these records except the log, and the log is one line per incident.
In the records diagnostic, a fixed-fee review of your timecard, break and safety records, we inventory the payroll calendars, off-cycle runs and late-payment logs against the §204 windows, and report which exist, which are complete and which are missing. MicroForensics does not run payroll. How often a crew is paid also bears on one PAGA penalty, and that sentence of the statute has its own post.
Pull last year's payroll calendar and put the actual settlement date beside every payday on it. Bring the two lists, and the off-cycle runs, to a free 30-minute call, and we will mark each payday that landed outside its window and whether anything on file says why. Whether a late payday was willful or intentional, and which route an employee could take, is a question for your counsel.
Free · 30 minutes. If it fits, the next step is the records diagnostic, a fixed fee quoted on the call, and anything paid after that is a separate agreement you sign first.