Payroll Trivia
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98 free Payroll trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free payroll trivia questions with answers. This payroll trivia quiz is written for payroll and HR teams, National Payroll Week events, office quiz nights and anyone curious about where a paycheck's numbers come from. It covers the mechanics (gross versus net, FICA rates, W-2 and W-4 forms, pay frequencies, garnishment limits, FUTA), the history (the 1938 minimum wage, withholding in 1943, the first Social Security number and first monthly benefit check, the Bundy time clock) and the industry (ADP, Paychex, PAYE in the UK). A few questions wander further afield: why 'salary' comes from salt, how company scrip trapped coal miners, and which country funds a third of its budget from payroll tax. Difficulty runs from things every employee half-knows to details only a payroll professional will get. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which pay schedule do US employers use most often?
Biweekly
Biweekly: 43% of US private businesses paid that way in a February 2023 federal survey, ahead of weekly at 27%. Paydays 14 days apart mean two months each year bring a third paycheck.
Q 02Which pay schedule gives a worker exactly 24 paychecks a year?
Semi-monthly
Semi-monthly: two fixed paydays a month, such as the 1st and the 15th, make 24. A salary split 24 ways rather than 26 gives slightly bigger checks than a biweekly plan pays.
Q 03What is the term for an employee's total earnings before any taxes or deductions are taken out?
Gross pay
Gross pay: for hourly workers it counts overtime as well as regular hours. Mortgage lenders weigh your monthly debts against this figure, not against what actually reaches your bank account.
Q 04FICA takes Social Security and Medicare taxes out of US paychecks; what does its 'I' stand for?
Insurance
Insurance: it is the Federal Insurance Contributions Act. The president behind the tax said paying in gave workers 'a legal, moral, and political right' to collect their pensions.
Q 05What rate of Social Security tax comes out of a US employee's wages?
6.2%
6.2%: the employer pays a matching 6.2%, but most economists say workers bear nearly all of both halves, because the employer's share comes out of wages that would otherwise be paid.
Q 06The employee's Medicare portion of FICA is 1.45% of wages, applied up to what limit?
Every dollar, no cap
Every dollar, no cap: Congress removed Medicare's wage ceiling after 1993, and employers now withhold an extra 0.9% on pay above $200,000, so Medicare's rate rises on high pay while Social Security's falls to zero.
Q 07By what date each year must US employers get Form W-2 to their employees?
January 31
January 31: since 2017 the government's copies are due the same day, moved up from as late as March so the IRS can match wages against returns before it pays out refunds.
Q 08Which IRS form does a new employee fill out to tell the employer how much tax to withhold?
W-4
W-4: the form was redesigned for 2020 to drop 'allowances', which were tied to personal exemptions that the 2017 tax law suspended. Its title is now simply Employee's Withholding Certificate.
Q 09For seven decades, paying a contractor $600 in a year meant a US business filed which form?
Form 1099
Form 1099: the $600 trigger was set in 1954 and never adjusted, though prices have risen more than tenfold since. A 2025 law finally raised it to $2,000 for payments from 2026.
Q 10US law sets what minimum pay for hours beyond 40 a week?
Time and a half
Time and a half: the 1938 law began with a 44-hour week and cut it to 40 by 1940. Making long hours costly was meant to push employers to hire more workers instead.
Q 11Which 1938 law set the first federal minimum wage, 25 cents an hour?
Fair Labor Standards Act
Fair Labor Standards Act: it left out farm and service workers, and Southern Democrats, keen to keep their region's lower wages, fought it hardest.
Q 12What has the US federal minimum wage been since 2009?
$7.25
$7.25: no raise has followed the one that took effect in July 2009. By mid-2026, 30 states had set higher floors of their own, several of them at $15 or more.
Q 13Whose US federal cash wage floor is just $2.13 an hour?
Tipped workers
Tipped workers: the $2.13 cash wage was half the minimum wage when it was set in 1991, and a 1996 law froze it there. If tips fall short, the employer must make up the difference.
Q 21Which payroll giant did accountant Henry Taub start in 1949 as a small bureau in Paterson, New Jersey?
ADP
ADP: despite the name Automatic Payrolls, its early payrolls were done manually; the Automatic Data Processing name came later. Early salesman Frank Lautenberg went on to become a US senator.
Q 22Which low-payroll baseball team's 2002 season is the subject of 'Moneyball'?
Oakland Athletics
Oakland Athletics: on about $40 million, under a third of the New York Yankees' payroll, they won 103 games that year and at one point took 20 in a row.
Q 23Paychex was founded in 1971 by Tom Golisano with how much starting capital?
$3,000
$3,000: plus his credit cards. His employer, a payroll processor for big companies, was not interested in his idea of serving small firms, so he left and did it himself.
Q 14Modern income tax withholding from US paychecks was introduced to fund what?
World War II
World War II: a 1943 law made employers take the tax out of each paycheck as wages were earned. Milton Friedman helped design the system at the Treasury and later wished it could be abolished.
Q 15Which president signed the Social Security Act into law?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt: Frances Perkins had made his backing for old-age pensions a condition of becoming his Labor Secretary in 1933, and she went on to direct the drafting of the law.
Q 16With few branches in 1936, Social Security took its first number applications through which network?
Post offices
Post offices: some 45,000 of them took the forms and 1,074 typed the cards. John Sweeney, announced as holder of the first record, died at 61 without ever collecting a benefit.
Q 17Ida May Fuller paid $24.75 in Social Security tax, retired and lived to 100; roughly how much did she collect?
$23,000
$23,000: her first monthly check, $22.54 in January 1940, nearly repaid everything she had paid in. She drew benefits for 35 years, $22,888.92 in all.
Q 18Which amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1913, lets Congress tax incomes?
The Sixteenth
The Sixteenth: conservatives in Congress proposed it in 1909 hoping to kill the income tax for good, sure that three-fourths of the states would never ratify. State after state did.
Q 19The office that became the IRS was created in 1862 to collect an income tax funding what?
The Civil War
The Civil War: Lincoln signed the 1862 law that created both the tax and its collector. The income tax was gone by 1872, but the office outlived it and was on hand when the tax returned for good in 1913.
Q 20Which retirement plan was born from a provision of the Revenue Act of 1978?
401(k)
401(k): the provision ran little more than a page. Benefits consultant Ted Benna, among the first to build a plan on it, added an employer match and never meant it to replace pensions.
Q 24Which country has taken income tax straight from wages under 'Pay As You Earn' since 1944?
United Kingdom
United Kingdom: Pay As You Earn replaced tax bills collected once or twice a year. The chancellor who pioneered it, Kingsley Wood, died suddenly on the very day he was due to announce it to Parliament.
Q 25The word 'salary' derives from the Latin salarium, which is itself derived from the word for what?
Salt
Salt: the Latin sal sits inside salarium, but how it came to mean pay is unknown. The popular story that Roman soldiers were paid in it has no ancient evidence behind it.
Q 26Willard Bundy's 1888 time clock became an early product line of which future computing giant?
IBM
IBM: the Bundy brothers' company was folded into one of the firms that became International Business Machines. IBM kept selling time clocks until 1958, when it sold that division to Simplex.
Q 27In payroll fraud, what name is given to a made-up or departed worker whose wages someone else quietly collects?
Ghost employee
Ghost employee: armies get them too. In 2014 an investigation found 50,000 'ghost soldiers' on the Iraqi military's payroll, their salaries thought to be pocketed by officers.
Q 28Which debt can take half a US paycheck, double the usual garnishment cap?
Child support
Child support: orders can claim 50% of a worker's pay, or 60% from someone with no other family to support. The same 1968 law bars an employer from firing a worker over a single garnishment.
Q 29What does the 'roll' in the word 'payroll' refer to?
A list of names
A list of names: records were once kept on rolled-up parchment, so 'roll' came to mean a register, as in 'roll call'. A payroll is, literally, the list of people to be paid.
Q 30The 2020 Paycheck Protection Program was created by which piece of legislation?
The CARES Act
The CARES Act: its loans were forgiven if the money kept staff on the payroll, and nearly all were. A 2022 study estimated that only a quarter to a third of it reached workers who would otherwise have lost their jobs.