Pitman and Panama are the same schedule. Both names describe one 14-day rotation: work 2, off 2, work 3, off 2, work 2, off 3, in 12-hour shifts. Which name you hear depends on the industry. The rotation is identical, so the math below applies to both.
We make Lumical, an app that scans rosters into your calendar, so read this with that in mind. Every number here is plain calendar math, and you can check each one on our free shift pattern visualizer.
The two-week block, day by day
Take a real fortnight: Monday, January 5 through Sunday, January 18, 2026, with your crew starting the cycle that Monday.
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 (Jan 5) | Work | Work | Off | Off | Work | Work | Work |
| Week 2 (Jan 12) | Off | Off | Work | Work | Off | Off | Off |
Week 1 is two on, two off, then three on across the weekend. Week 2 mirrors it: two off, two on, three off. That closing Friday to Sunday block is the schedule’s big selling point, a 3-day weekend every other week without spending leave.
Count the shifts: seven per fortnight, 84 hours. One 36-hour week, one 48-hour week, a 42-hour average. Across 2026 that comes to 182 or 183 shifts (2,184 or 2,196 hours), depending on where your crew’s cycle sits in January.
Locked to the same weekdays all year
Here is the part rosters rarely spell out. The cycle is 14 days long and so is a fortnight, so the pattern never drifts. If you work Mondays and Tuesdays in week 1, you work those same weekdays in every week 1 for the rest of the year.
That lock cuts both ways. The crew in the table above gets every other weekend completely free: 26 full weekends off in 2026. But the alignment is fixed by whoever drew the roster, and not every alignment contains a free weekend. Lay the same cycle onto the 2026 calendar all 14 possible ways and 8 of them give 26 full weekends. The other 6 give exactly zero, because a shift touches every single Saturday or Sunday of the year. There is no in-between, and it never averages out. Compare that with 4 on 4 off, which drifts through the week and lands every crew near 19 or 20.
Nights are harsher again. A Friday night shift ends Saturday morning, which spoils that weekend even though Saturday shows as off on the roster. Averaged over every alignment, 2-2-3 day crews see 14.9 full weekends in 2026 and night crews just 3.7. We wrote up why in the Friday night rule.
See your own year
Whether your crew drew a lucky alignment takes seconds to check. The 2-2-3 calendar for 2026 lays out the whole year, and the 2027 version is ready for when your roster rolls over. To weigh 2-2-3 against other rotations, the visualizer charts full weekends off, night counts, and recovery days side by side, and exports the chart as a PNG for the group chat.
Do you need an app for this?
For the template itself, no. A locked 14-day rotation fits on a paper calendar or a spreadsheet in one sitting and stays correct all year. Hand-typing falls apart on the real roster: swaps, overtime, training days, and shift codes packed into a grid photo from your supervisor. That is the job Lumical does. Photograph the whole roster once, review what it found, and every shift lands in your calendar with overnights on the right days.
If your schedule lives on a printed grid instead of a clean 2-2-3 template, get Lumical on the App Store and scan it in one go.