Salary Conversion from Bi-weekly to Semi-monthly Mid-year

Question

My company changed payroll from bi-weekly to semi-monthly this March. The last bi-weekly pay period before conversion ended on 2/28/2019. The first semi-monthly pay period started on 3/1. I am a salaried employee and they way they are making up for the two missed paychecks is by adding 6.67 hours to each paycheck to get to 2080 hours for the year. However for the pay periods from

12/22-01/04 - 80

01/05-01/18 - 80

01/19-02/01 - 80

02/02-02/15 - 80

02/16-02/28 - 80

03/01-03/15 - 80

03/16-03/31 - 86.67

I only received 80 hours per check. So in my calculations that is 7 paychecks for 566.67 hours. Subtract that from 2080 leaves 1513.41 hours for the rest of the year. 1513.41 divided by 17 remaining pay checks(24 - 7 = 17, 24 paychecks for semi-monthly). And I get 2.35 hours short per paycheck so that added to the 86.67 i should be getting 89.02 hours on my remaining checks.

HR is saying that I already got paid for days from 12/22-12/31. But the breakdown for pay periods is not correct IMHO. Please see below for their pay period breakdown which includes a paycheck from 2020 totaling 25 paychecks when there should only be 24 in a semi-monthly payroll.

Answer 1

Your 566.67 hours calculation is incorrect. On Jan 11 you got paid for time worked between Dec 22 and Jan 4, that's only 4 days of pay in current year, 6 in prior year (based on your figures I'm assuming 5-day workweek and 8 hour workday). So your number includes 48 hours worked in 2018, removing those extra 6 days from 2018 puts you at 518.67 by the end of March 2019.

If you count 86.67 * 2 for the remaining 9 months (April through December) you get 1560.06, added to your 518.67 that gets you 2078.73. Pretty close to the expected 2080. If the gross pay works out then hours don't really matter (assuming you're exempt salaried employee as @D Stanley mentions).

25 paychecks makes sense because the first check of the year covered part of last year and part of this year, next year's first January check will only cover the latter half of December, so you'll get 24 checks next year.