My sister called me last summer, mildly panicked. She'd just started a new job — her first time on Workday — and needed a recent pay stub for an apartment application. She'd logged in, clicked around for fifteen minutes, and come up empty. "This thing is supposed to show me my checks," she kept saying. "Why is it so hidden?"
She wasn't wrong. Workday is powerful, but the path to your pay stub isn't obvious if nobody's shown you. And unlike ADP or Paychex, Workday's layout shifts depending on how your employer has configured its tenant — which means step-by-step guides you find online are often almost right but not quite.
Here's how to actually see your paystub on Workday — on desktop and on the mobile app — and what to do when it's not showing up.
Finding your paystub on the web version
Start by logging in through your employer's Workday URL. It usually looks like myapp.workday.com/companyname or something your IT team sent you during onboarding. If you've lost it, search your email for "Workday" — the welcome message almost always includes the link. Or ask a coworker, which is faster.
Once you're logged in, look at the home page. You're hunting for a tile or worklet labeled Pay. On some tenants it sits front and center on the dashboard. On others it's tucked inside a "Menu" button in the top-left corner, or under "View All Apps." Either way, click into it.
Inside the Pay hub, you'll see a list of options. The one you want is usually Payslips or My Payslips, though some employers rename it to just "Pay Stubs." Click that.
You'll get a list of pay periods, most recent on top. Click any row and Workday opens the paystub as a PDF — either in a new tab, a preview pane, or a download prompt, depending on your browser. Save it to your computer and you're done.
That's the whole dance for the web: Pay → Payslips → click the period → download the PDF. Four clicks once you know where to look.
On the Workday mobile app
The mobile app follows the same logic, with slightly more tapping.
Open the Workday app and sign in with the same credentials you use on the web. If your employer uses single sign-on or MFA, expect the same prompts.
On the home screen, scroll until you see a card labeled Pay — it often has a wallet or dollar-sign icon. Tap it, then tap Payslips. You'll land on a list of pay periods. Tap the one you need.
Here's where mobile differs from web: the app doesn't always give you a native PDF download button. You'll usually see a three-dot menu in the corner, or an export icon (a little square with an arrow pointing up). Tap that and choose View PDF, Export, or Share — the wording varies by app version.
That opens the stub in your phone's PDF viewer. On iPhone, I use Share → Save to Files, which drops the PDF into iCloud. On Android, Share → Save as PDF puts it wherever your downloads go. Either way, you end up with a proper PDF you can attach to an email, upload to a landlord portal, or keep for your records.
Why Workday feels more confusing than it should
Here's the thing nobody tells you about Workday: every company configures its tenant slightly differently.
Your employer's Workday isn't quite the same as my sister's employer's Workday. The labels can differ. The menu structure can differ. Whether Payslips is a top-level item or buried two clicks deep depends on decisions a Workday admin made a year ago and forgot about.
This is why the instructions you find online are often almost right but not exact. Someone wrote a guide based on their company's setup, and when you follow it on yours, step four says "click the Pay Cycles tab" and there is no Pay Cycles tab.
When in doubt, treat Workday's search bar — it sits at the top of the screen on both web and mobile — as your escape hatch. Type payslip or pay stub and Workday will usually surface the right page directly, bypassing whatever menu structure your admin set up. It's the single most reliable way to get to your stubs when the navigation looks unfamiliar.
When your paystub isn't showing up
Sometimes the stub genuinely isn't there. A few reasons this happens:
The pay period hasn't been finalized yet. Workday doesn't publish the PDF until your employer runs payroll end-of-cycle. If your direct deposit hit this morning and you're already hunting for the stub, give it a few hours — the deposit can arrive a full day before the PDF appears. Annoying but normal.
You're looking at the wrong filter. The Payslips page usually defaults to the current year. If you need a stub from eighteen months ago, expand the date range or click the year filter. I've watched people convince themselves a stub was deleted when it was simply filtered out of view.
You're in the wrong tenant. If you've worked at two companies that both use Workday, you might be logged into the previous employer's tenant. Check the company name and logo at the top of the screen, not just that Workday itself is loaded.
Your employer paused payslip visibility. Less common, but it happens during system migrations or right after a role change. HR can confirm, and it's not something you can fix from your end.
SSO got stuck. If the Payslips page loads blank or spins indefinitely, log out fully and log back in. Single sign-on sessions occasionally get into a state where Workday thinks you're authenticated but can't actually fetch your data.
If none of those apply and the stub still isn't there, message HR. Don't assume the worst — ninety percent of the time it's a settings quirk, not a problem with your pay.
What to do after you download it
Now you've got the PDF. What next depends on why you wanted it.
If this was a one-off — a lease application, a loan pre-approval, proof of income for a visa filing — you're done. Attach the PDF to the email, send it off, move on.
If you're doing this repeatedly, though, a PDF sitting in your Downloads folder isn't ideal. Tax season reconciliation, tracking income across jobs, auditing your W-2 against your year's stubs — any of those gets painful when your data is locked inside PDFs that don't easily sum or compare.
Disclosure up front: I built StubSheet, which converts Workday pay stub PDFs into Excel or CSV using AI extraction. So I'm biased. I built it because the "copy numbers from PDF to spreadsheet" workflow was the worst part of my own tax prep, and manual typing is the kind of task that invites small errors you won't catch until April.
That said — StubSheet is single-file upload right now. No true batch yet. If you're an accountant dealing with twenty-six stubs for a client, our competitor StubToCSV has batch upload today and is the more practical option at that volume. I'd rather be honest about that than pretend we're the right tool for every scenario.
If you want to understand what's actually inside the stub you just downloaded — every column, what each deduction means, why your net pay looks smaller than you expected — we've got a primer called How to Read a Pay Stub that walks through the anatomy. Worth reading once if you've never looked carefully at your own stub.
The short version
On Workday, pay stubs live inside the Pay section, under Payslips. Both the web app and the mobile app work. Web gives you a faster PDF download; mobile takes a couple extra taps through a Share menu.
If you can't find your stub: check the date filter, wait a few hours if the pay period just closed, or use Workday's top search bar to bypass your employer's menu layout. If the page loads blank, log out and log back in.
Once you've got the PDF, think about where it goes next. A paystub you downloaded and immediately forgot about isn't worth much. A paystub you filed cleanly, or converted to a row in a spreadsheet you can reference later, is. Whether you type the numbers by hand, use StubSheet, or use StubToCSV, the ten minutes of organization pay back every single April.