Accelerated Biweekly Payments

The mechanic: 26 half payments make 13 months

The whole trick is arithmetic. Take your monthly payment, cut it in half, and pay that amount every two weeks. A year contains 52 weeks, so you make 26 half payments: 26 times (monthly ÷ 2) equals 13 full monthly payments in a 12-month year.

That 13th payment is pure extra principal. Because interest accrues on your outstanding balance, every dollar of it stops charging interest immediately and keeps compounding in your favour for the rest of the loan. This is why a schedule change that feels invisible week to week produces such outsized savings by the end of the amortization.

Regular biweekly is not the same thing

Here is the trap. Lenders also offer plain (non-accelerated) biweekly payments: your monthly payment times 12, divided by 26, paid every two weeks. That works out to exactly 12 months of payments per year, just sliced into 26 pieces. It matches your paycheque schedule, but it accelerates almost nothing; the savings over a full 25-year mortgage amount to roughly a thousand dollars.

Both options sit side by side on the same bank form, one labelled "biweekly" and one "accelerated biweekly", and the difference in wording hides a difference of tens of thousands of dollars. People routinely pick the plain version believing that paying more often is what saves money. It is not. The frequency does nothing; the extra half payment does everything.

What it saves on a $400,000 mortgage

Take a $400,000 mortgage at 5% with a 25-year amortization period (as of July 2026). The monthly payment is about $2,326. The regular biweekly version is $1,074 every two weeks; the accelerated version is $1,163, half the monthly amount.

Reading the numbers

The accelerated schedule costs $89 more per payment than the regular biweekly one, about $2,300 more per year. In exchange, the mortgage is gone roughly three and a half years sooner with about $48,000 less interest paid. These figures are approximate and shift with your rate and balance; run your own numbers in our Mortgage Calculator.

There is also an accelerated weekly variant: a quarter of your monthly payment every week, 52 times a year, which lands on the same 13-months-per-year math and nearly identical savings.

A built-in prepayment that fits your privileges

Accelerated biweekly is really an automatic prepayment plan in disguise. The extra half payment amounts to increasing your payments by about 8.3%, which fits comfortably inside the payment-increase allowance of a typical prepayment privilege, so there is no penalty risk. And because most lenders let you switch payment frequency at any time for free, it is one of the cheapest set-and-forget moves in Canadian personal finance, especially if you are paid biweekly and the withdrawals sync with payday.