How Many Employees Does One 24/7 Post Need in Norway?
Holding one position every hour of 2026 in Norway takes 8,766 staffed hours. One full-time employee is genuinely available for about 1,595 of them, so the post needs 5.5 employees, which is 6 whole people.
One ring per person, one year each
Each ring is one employee's year, broken wherever they are on holiday, on leave, or off sick. No single ring closes, which is the whole problem: one person cannot hold a post that never stops.
Stack 6 of them and the picture closes. Trace any line out from the center and it crosses at least one solid arc, so every hour of 2026 has somebody on it. That is the relief factor, drawn rather than asserted.
Where the number comes from
- 1
Staffing one position 168 hours a week comes to 8,766 hours across the year.
- 2
Norway has 261 weekdays in the year, the starting point for one employee.
- 3
Take out 8 public holidays that fall on a weekday, 21 days of statutory paid leave, 16.4 days of average sickness absence, and 3 days of training: 48.4 days lost.
- 4
That leaves 212.6 working days per employee, and at a 37.5-hour week that is 7.5 hours a day, so 1,595 available hours a year.
- 5
8,766 coverage hours divided by 1,595 available hours is a relief factor of 5.5, so the post needs 6 people.
| Weekdays in the year | 261 |
| Public holidays on a weekday | −8 |
| Statutory paid annual leave | −21 |
| Average sickness absence | −16.4 |
| Training and onboarding (assumed) | −3 |
| Working days available | 212.6 |
| At 7.5 hours a day | 1,595 hours |
Paid public holidays are a statutory entitlement in Norway, so they sit on top of annual leave and are deducted separately here.
The training allowance of 3 days is a planning assumption rather than a sourced statistic, and it is deliberately low. Every other figure on this page carries a source. If your operation runs heavy certification cycles, raise it and the relief factor rises with it.
What the usual rule of thumb gets wrong here
The common shortcut is to divide coverage hours by contracted hours and add a quarter for absence. In Norway that gives 5.6 against a derived answer of 5.5, so the shortcut is high by 1.8 percent. A flat buffer travels badly because the things it stands in for, statutory leave and the length of the contracted week, are set nationally.
Nobody ever away. Not a real answer.
The usual shortcut, over by 1.8%.
From Norway's own leave, hours, and absence.
Other coverage shapes
The same availability figure answers any coverage window. Only the hours the post must be staffed change.
| Coverage | Hours a week | Relief factor | People |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round the clock, every day | 168 | 5.5 | 6 |
| Round the clock, weekdays only | 120 | 3.93 | 4 |
| Two shifts, every day | 112 | 3.67 | 4 |
| Extended day, weekdays only | 60 | 1.96 | 2 |
If your contract is more generous
21 days is the statutory floor in Norway, and most employers sit above it. Every extra week of leave is another week the post has to be covered by somebody else.
| Annual leave | Relief factor | People per post |
|---|---|---|
| 21 daysstatutory floor | 5.5 | 6 |
| 25 days | 5.6 | 6 |
| 28 days | 5.68 | 6 |
| 30 days | 5.74 | 6 |
| 33 days | 5.83 | 6 |
The inputs, and what they do not say
How the leave figure is defined
The law states leave in "virkedager" (working days) on a SIX-day week in which Saturday counts as a working day, so the statutory 25 virkedager equals 4 weeks and 1 day. Converted to a 5-day week that is 21 working days (4 x 5 + 1). Public holidays are excluded: they are not virkedager and are not drawn from the leave balance.
Why the contracted week is not the legal maximum
This page divides by a 37.5-hour week, the typical full-time contract in Norway, not by the 40-hour statutory figure. That larger number is a legal ceiling on how much someone may be asked to work, not a description of what a full-time employee is contracted for, and using it as capacity would understate the headcount a post needs.
What these figures cannot be used for
Not a ranking. The sickness figure here comes from a national statistical source, while other countries in this library use the OECD labour force survey. Those systems define absence differently, and self-reported survey figures undercount short spells that administrative records capture. Each number is the best available answer for planning inside its own country, and the gap between any two of them is partly a gap between statistical methods rather than between workforces.
A relief factor also says nothing about whether a roster is legal or humane. It sets how many people the post needs across a year; it does not check rest periods between shifts, consecutive nights, or weekend distribution. Those constraints decide whether the pattern you build on top of this headcount is one anybody can actually work.
Research notes on Norway
LEAVE IS THE TRAP HERE, AND 21 IS DELIBERATE. Ferieloven section 5 grants "minst 25 virkedager" and section 5 defines virkedager as all days except Sundays and public holidays, so Saturday counts. Arbeidstilsynet states this plainly: "Siden lordag regnes som virkedag, vil det normalt si at arbeidstaker har krav pa fire uker og en dag ferie hvert kalenderar" (four weeks and one day). On a 5-day week that is 21 working days, not 25. Most published comparison tables list Norway as 25 days, which silently mixes the six-day virkedag count with a five-day working week and overstates the statutory minimum by four days. If your calculator elsewhere uses five-day working days, 21 is the consistent number.
BUT THE PRACTICAL PLANNING NUMBER IS USUALLY 25, NOT 21. A fifth holiday week came from the 2000/2001 national wage settlement, not from the Holidays Act. Employees covered by those collective agreements get 30 virkedager = 25 working days on a 5-day week, and holiday pay rises from 10.2% to 12%. Coverage is very high in Norway but not universal, so 21 is the legal floor and 25 is what most real full-time employees actually take. Employees aged 60+ get one extra week (statutory, 31 virkedager = 26 working days on a 5-day week). Norway also has roughly 10 public holidays on top, of which about 9 or 10 fall on weekdays in a given year.
HOURS. The Working Environment Act (arbeidsmiljoloven section 10-4) sets normal working hours at 40 per 7-day period and 9 per 24-hour period. The Act sets lower statutory ceilings for demanding schedules: 38 hours for round-the-clock work on weekdays and 36 hours for round-the-clock work including weekends. I used 40 as the headline statutory figure, but if your calculator is aimed at shift operations the binding statutory limit for a continuous rota is 36, not 40, and that is a material difference. Collective agreements have set 37.5 hours since 1986 and the legislature never followed, so 37.5 is the near-universal contracted full-time week for day work. Shift workers under collective agreements are commonly lower again (broadly 35.5 for two-shift and around 33.6 for continuous shift), so treat 37.5 as the day-work figure.
SICKNESS, WITH WORKING SHOWN. SSB publishes a rate, not days, so this is a conversion and carries more uncertainty than the other three figures. SSB annual 2025 sickness absence was 6.57% (legemeldt / doctor-certified 5.54%, egenmeldt / self-certified 1.03%), published 26 February 2026, down from 6.8% in 2024. SSB defines the rate as sickness absence man-days divided by contractual man-days, and defines man-days as "kalenderdager minus helgedager og offisielle fridager" (calendar days minus weekends and public holidays). Critically, SSB stopped vacation-adjusting the denominator from Q1 2019, so annual leave is NOT deducted. The correct denominator is therefore about 250 days: roughly 260 to 261 weekdays per year minus about 9 or 10 weekday public holidays. 6.57% x 250 = 16.4 days. Using the exact 2025 calendar (261 weekdays minus 9 weekday public holidays = 252) gives 16.6, so the honest range is 16.4 to 16.6 and I reported the lower, rounder base.
DO NOT RE-APPLY THE PERCENTAGE TO A POST-LEAVE WORKING YEAR. Because SSB's denominator includes vacation days but the numerator does not count sickness during vacation, applying 6.57% to a leave-adjusted year of about 229 days yields 15.0 and undercounts. Use the 16.4 day figure directly. Expressed against days an employee is actually scheduled to work, the effective loss rate is nearer 7.2%.
Sickness varies enormously by sector and sex in Norway, far more than the national average suggests: municipal services run well above the average (doctor-certified absence in municipal services was 10.1% in Q1 2025) and private sector well below. A single national average will misstate any specific shift operation, and for a care or municipal roster the average is too low.
Sources
Every figure above except the training allowance was checked against one of these.
Statutory normal working hours: 9 hours per 24-hour period and 40 hours per 7-day period; 38 hours for round-the-clock work on weekdays and 36 hours including weekends. Also states that shorter hours may be set by contract or collective agreement and that "A common arrangement is 37.5 hours per week."
Working Environment Act (arbeidsmiljoloven), official English text, working hours chapter 10
Act relating to Holidays (ferieloven) section 5: minimum 25 virkedager (working days) of holiday per year; all days count as working days except Sundays and public holidays, so Saturday is a virkedag. Employees over 60 get an extra week (31 virkedager).
Lovdata (official Norwegian legal information, Ministry of Justice / Faculty of Law foundation)2026
"Alle arbeidstakere har krav pa minst 25 virkedager ferie hvert ar." "Virkedager er det samme som hverdager og lordager. Sondager og helligdager regnes ikke som virkedager." "Siden lordag regnes som virkedag, vil det normalt si at arbeidstaker har krav pa fire uker og en dag ferie hvert kalenderar." Also confirms the fifth week comes from the 2000/2001 collective agreement, not the Act.
Annual sickness absence rate 2025: 6.57% total (5.54% doctor-certified, 1.03% self-certified), down 2.7% from 6.8% in 2024. Published 26 February 2026.
Methodology for the sickness absence rate: (sickness absence man-days / contractual man-days) x 100, where man-days are "kalenderdager minus helgedager og offisielle fridager" (calendar days minus weekends and public holidays) and vacation correction (feriekorrigering) has been discontinued from Q1 2019, so annual leave is not deducted from the denominator. Used for the percentage-to-days conversion.
Common questions
- How many people does one 24/7 position need in Norway?
- 6 people. One position staffed every hour of the year is 8,766 hours, and one full-time employee in Norway is actually available for about 1,595 of them once 48.4 days of holidays, leave, sickness and training come out. That is a relief factor of 5.5, which rounds up to 6 whole people.
- What is a relief factor?
- The number of employees needed to keep one position filled continuously, once the days nobody works are taken out. It is coverage hours divided by the hours one employee is genuinely available. In Norway that is 8,766 divided by 1,595, or 5.5. A factor below the headcount you actually employ means the post runs on overtime.
- Why is a flat 25 percent absence buffer not enough for Norway?
- Because it overshoots here. A raw hours calculation gives 4.48 employees, and adding a flat quarter takes that to 5.6, against a derived answer of 5.5. That is 1.8 percent too high, because the rule of thumb assumes more leave and sickness than Norway actually loses.
- Does the statutory leave minimum reflect what employers actually give in Norway?
- It is a floor, not a norm. This page computes on the statutory minimum of 21 working days because that is the figure the law fixes and a source can be attached to. Most employers sit above it, and the sensitivity table on this page shows what the relief factor becomes at more generous entitlements, so a planner can find their own contract rather than taking the floor as the answer.
Your next schedule could take 2 minutes.
Import your team, set your rules, hit auto-fill. Most teams are live the same day.
30 days free ยท No credit card required
Already have an account?Sign in
