Economic effects of Leap Day, from salaries to rent payments

Today is Leap Day, and as fans of the NBC sitcom “30 Rock” may tell you: real life is for March. But in the real world, Feb. 29 remains real life, and that means real work, real pay and real expenses.

The quadannual event ends largely in an economic wash. As NYU Stern School of Business professor Lawrence White put it, the monetary consequences of Leap Day amount to “not a whole hell of a lot.”

Put Leap Day under microscope, though, and a few financial winners and losers appear.

For hourly workers and day laborers, for example, the extra day offers an opportunity to pad their pockets. “You get to work an extra day and make extra money,” said Ken McMullen, chief marketing officer at Brighton-based Executive Wealth Management.

Salaried employees, on the other hand, may feel like an extra day at the office without additional compensation is akin to taking a pay cut. The extra day’s work means an employee who earns an annual salary of $50,000 makes about 73 cents less per day over the course of the year, McMullen said.

That pay structure can stand to benefit some employers this year.

“If you’ve got salaried staff, the actual real wage you’re paying them per unit of output decreases over the course of the year by a marginal amount due to the additional working day,” said Lucas Gibbard, an economist at the London-based Centre for Economics and Business Research.

The difference may amount to just pennies on the dollar — or a single penny on $3.65 — but it’s enough to make a large employer’s accounting office notice.

Leap Day can be seen as something of a small bargain for gym-goers, home-renters and streaming service-subscribers who reap the benefits of February’s additional day without their monthly payments going up.

For publicly traded companies, the quadannual event can be an asterisk on quarterly earnings reports. That, too, may seem small on the surface, but a 90 day Q1 versus a 91 day Q1 can be the difference of millions of dollars for some big businesses.

Leap Day, however, is not the kind of event that drives consumers to stores like the other major holidays.

“Even for St. Patrick’s Day, go into your local CVS or Rite Aid or Walgreens and you’ll see greeting cards and some shelves of decorations,” White said. “Nobody’s doing that for Leap Day.”

McMullen compared the non-holiday holiday to a “global chiropractic adjustment,” saying that the financial effects of Leap Day are fun to look at but are mostly just anecdotal.

“In reality, you’re not getting an extra day,” he said. “It’s getting our calendar in line with what’s already happening in nature. It’s one big chiropractic crack and then we’re in line for another four years.”