The Kelly schedule is a 9 day cycle built from 24 hour shifts: on for 24, off for 24, on again, off again, a third 24 on, then 4 straight days off. Three shifts in nine days. Fire departments usually run it with three platoons staggered three days apart, which puts exactly one platoon on duty every calendar day.
We make Lumical, an app that scans work rosters into your calendar, so read this with that in mind. Everything below follows from the cycle itself, and you can draw any rotation on our free shift pattern visualizer.
The 9 day cycle, day by day
| Day of cycle | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 | On duty, a 24 hour shift |
| 2 | Off, you got home this morning |
| 3 | On duty |
| 4 | Off |
| 5 | On duty |
| 6 to 9 | The 4 day break |
That last block is the point of the whole design, and it is why some departments call this the Kelly day system. The break comes around every nine days without costing any vacation time.
A 24 hour shift covers two calendar days
Most fire shifts start in the morning, commonly at 7 or 8 am, and end the next morning. The printed roster shows one shaded box per shift, but you live it across two days. That hides two things. The 24 off between shifts is really one night at home: you leave the station after handover and you are due back at the same hour the next day. And the 4 day break opens with a recovery morning, because day 6 begins with you walking out of a 24. Door to door the break is 96 hours, which is why it feels like the heart of the schedule.
Why the Kelly shift schedule averages 56 hours
Three 24 hour shifts per 9 days is 72 hours. Spread over nine days that is 8 hours a day, and 8 times 7 is 56. No single week actually contains 56 hours, though. Any real calendar week catches either two or three of your shifts, so you work 48 hours one week and 72 another, and only the average lands on 56.
That average looks heavy next to a 40 hour office week, but the hours are a different kind. A 24 at the station includes overnight hours where you may sleep between calls. Whether and how those hours are paid, and what counts as overtime, varies by department, contract, and country. Check yours before turning any of this into money math.
The 4 day break drifts through the week
Nine is two more than seven, so each cycle starts two weekdays later than the one before. A break that runs Friday to Monday this cycle runs Sunday to Wednesday the next. After seven cycles, 63 days, everything lines up with the same weekdays again. Some breaks will contain a full weekend and some will not touch one, and how many do in a given year depends on where your platoon’s rotation started. The 2026 Kelly calendar and the 2027 one draw the whole year on real dates, count the weekends, and give you a file to import. For other start dates there is the visualizer. If your partner works a different pattern, days off together shows which off days the two of you actually share.
Firefighter Kelly schedule variations
The 9 day version above is common but far from universal. The other two big fire rotations are 24/48, one shift on and two days off in a repeating 3 day cycle, and 48/96, two back-to-back shifts followed by four days off. Run the numbers and all three average the same 56 hours a week. The choice between them is about rhythm. 24/48 gives you a real gap after every shift but never a long break. Kelly accepts tighter gaps mid cycle to buy the 4 day block.
Two more wrinkles. In many departments a Kelly day means something else entirely: an extra scheduled day off inserted to pull the average below 56 hours. Both uses of the name are usually traced to Edward Kelly, Chicago’s mayor in the 1930s, whose administration cut firefighter hours. Where your Kelly days fall is a contract question, not a math one. And some departments have left 24 hour shifts behind for 12 hour rotations like DuPont, which slice the same coverage into smaller pieces.
Getting a Kelly roster into your calendar
The hard part is not the pattern, it is the roster on the station wall: a month grid shaded in platoon colors, with trades and holdovers penciled in, where every event spans two calendar days. Typed into a phone by hand, a 24 usually gets entered as ending the same day it starts, and the second half of every shift quietly vanishes. Someone plans a Wednesday lunch you will spend on duty. Lumical reads a photo of that grid and files each shift with its real start and end, so a Tuesday morning start blocks Wednesday morning too. You review everything it found before anything saves.
Working Kelly from a paper roster? Get Lumical on the App Store and put the whole month in your calendar from one photo.