Workweek vs. Pay Period
A workweek is any consecutive seven-day period starting with the same calendar day and hour each week. A workweek is a fixed and recurring period of 168 hours, seven consecutive twenty-four hour periods, and should be established by every employer and ideally made clear to employees in a handbook or written pay policy. Hours worked in two or more workweeks shall not be averaged for computation of overtime in Colorado.
A Pay Period is a period of service for which you pay wages. Put another way, it is a reoccurring length of time over which employee's earn wages.
Examples of pay periods are: weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, and monthly.
The Colorado Department of Labor discusses pay periods as such:
"The employer and employee may, by mutual agreement, determine the period of wage and salary payments. In the absence of such agreement, Colorado wage law provides: All wages or compensation shall be due and payable for regular pay periods of no greater duration than one calendar month or thirty days, whichever is longer. Regular paydays must be no later than ten days following the close of each pay period. The pay periods described above do not apply to compensation payments due an employee under a profit-sharing plan, a pension plan, or other similar deferred compensation programs.
It is the policy of the Division of Labor that any changes to either the pay period schedule or to the date of the payday must adhere to the time frames specified above (or such changes must be mutually agreed-upon by both employer and employee). Employers may not make changes that violate the calendar month or thirty-day pay period requirement for regular pay periods, nor may they make changes that violate the ten-day payday requirement, unless the employer and the employee mutually agree on any other alternative period of wage or salary payments."