A full weekend off is one where no shift touches Saturday or Sunday. That definition does most of the work in the table below, because a Friday night shift ends on Saturday morning and takes the weekend with it. Count weekends that way and the rotations sort themselves.
We make Lumical, an app that scans work rosters into your calendar, so read this with that in mind. Nothing here is an estimate. Every figure is calendar math for 2027, laid on real dates and computed when this page was built.
The table
Weekends off and days worked are averaged across every phase of each cycle, because where your crew sits in the rotation changes the answer. Hours assume every scheduled shift is worked: no overtime, no swaps, no leave. Each pattern name links to its 2027 calendar.
| Pattern | Full weekends off | Days worked | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 on 2 off | 52 | 261 | 2,088 |
| 14 on 14 off | 24.1 | 182.5 | 2,190 |
| 7 on 7 off | 22.3 | 182.5 | 2,190 |
| 5-5-4 | 20.4 | 182.5 | 2,190 |
| 4 on 4 off | 19.5 | 182.5 | 2,190 |
| 8 on 6 off | 18.6 | 208.6 | 2,503 |
| 48/96 | 17.3 | 121.7 | 2,921 |
| 3 on 3 off | 17.3 | 182.5 | 2,190 |
| 2-2-3 | 14.9 | 182.5 | 2,190 |
| DuPont | 14.9 | 182.5 | 2,190 |
| 14 on 7 off | 14.9 | 243.3 | 2,920 |
| 2 on 2 off | 13 | 182.5 | 2,190 |
| Kelly schedule | 11.6 | 121.7 | 2,921 |
| 21 on 7 off | 11.1 | 273.8 | 3,286 |
| 6 on 4 off | 10.4 | 219 | 2,190 |
| 4 on 2 off | 8.7 | 243.3 | 1,946 |
| 6 on 2 off | 6.5 | 273.8 | 2,190 |
| Southern Swing | 5.6 | 273.8 | 2,190 |
| Baylor | 0 | 104 | 1,248 |
| 24/48 | 0 | 121.7 | 2,921 |
| 12x36 | 0 | 182.5 | 2,190 |
| Continental | 0 | 273.8 | 2,190 |
| 6 on 1 off | 0 | 313 | 2,294 |
How to read it
Three things are worth knowing before you use these numbers in an argument.
A high weekend count is not a light year. A fixed Monday to Friday week keeps all 52 weekends and still works more days than most 12 hour rotations. The rotations at the bottom of the weekend column often have the fewest working days.
Locked cycles hide a range. A rotation whose cycle divides evenly into whole weeks (14, 21 or 28 days) never drifts, so one crew can take almost every weekend and another almost none. The average in the table is the fair figure for the pattern; your own crew may sit at either end. The calendar pages show the spread for each one.
Nights cost weekends twice. They spoil the Friday-to-Saturday weekend and they turn the first day off into a morning asleep. The Friday night rule works through why.
Where the numbers come from
One engine draws the year day by day from a repeating cycle, then counts. The same engine produces the calendar pages, the interactive visualizer and the machine-readable files at /data/shift-patterns. If a number here disagrees with a calendar page, that is a bug, not a rounding choice.
Working one of these rotations from a printed roster? Get Lumical on the App Store and put the real thing in Apple Calendar from one photo.