When I lived and worked in Canada it was biweekly direct deposits. I'm now in Europe and needed to register as a freelancer. I invoice and get it deposited to my bank account. How often etc it's paid depends on the studio and duration of the project. I've had worked with studio that paid me after the project was done (ranging from 5 day project to a month) and worked with studios that hired me for a longer time which I would invoice (to their schedule) monthly.

The majority of the studios was negotiated pay, I think except for three of the freelance ones. One was immediately a really good offer and didn't require negotiation. The other one was very bad, but a really long contract. No negotiations possible, but still took it to bridge my work a bit. And the third one had no wiggle room for negotiation so I rejected it, they came back to me three days later with another project that offered a shorter term but a lot better pay.

In Canada I got insurance as a benefit with most of my contracts, this included coverage for my partner as well. Now that I freelance there's zero benefits involved, but the pay is usually a bit better (all except for the one with the long contract)