The implementation of the 3.5% raise due July 1 appears to have gone smoothly. There are two sources of confusion, though.
First, the July 1 raise only covers the second week of the July 5 paycheck, not the full 10 days. If you wait until your next (July 19) paycheck your annual base should have increased by 3.5%, which you can determine by multiplying your FY 24 annual base salary by 1.035.
When calculating raises, always use your gross salary, because your net (take home) pay may vary with deductions such as taxes, parking fees and health insurance payments or additions such as overtime or extra pay.
Second, Rutgers uses a complicated calculation to fit the “annual salary” into the bi-weekly paycheck. Rutgers calculates your biweekly rate based on number of working days in a fiscal year. For FY 25 (July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025) that is 261 days, whereas in FY 24 there were 260 days. The difference is due to the day of the week when the Winter holiday fell.
The result is that your annual pay divided by the extra day will reduce the daily pay rate by a fraction of a percent, so your regular paycheck will be slightly lower, but your annual salary will remain the same. See the chart for “Count of Work Days” to see the work days for this decade.
If your analysis shows what you believe to be an error in how the contractual raises were implemented for you, email us at union@ura-aft.org so we can review.
