2-2-3 (Panama) rota for 12 people

Twelve people, 4 teams of 3, 12-hour shifts. On every date in this grid one team is on days and one is on nights, so 6 of your 12 are on duty and 6 are at home, and that split never moves. There is no busy Tuesday and no thin Sunday in this rota. The crew in the room is 3 at every hour of the year, days and nights alike.

The cycle runs 28 days, which is longer than the cadence sounds, and the reason is worth knowing before you read the grid. The 2-2-3 shape is drawn twice: once on days, then the identical shape again on nights. Every team runs the same rhythm through both halves, which is why everyone lands on 42 hours a week and no team carries more than another.

What follows is the whole year at once: 13 cycles across 364 dated days, every shift named and timed, split by team. Read down a column for one team's life. Read across a row and you get the more useful view, which team is on days, which is on nights, and which 6 of your 12 are at home.

People

4 teams of 3

Hours a week

12-hour shifts

Cycle

28 days

13 cycles in the grid

On duty

every day of the cycle

Take the grid

364 dated days, 13 complete cycles, starting 2026-08-24 and ending 2027-08-22. Every shift is checked for coverage before the file is written, so no date in it leaves a shift unstaffed.

Download CSV Team A calendar Team B calendar Team C calendar Team D calendar

The first four weeks

Each row is a week, each cell a team's shift on that date. The full 364-day grid is in the download.

DDay07:00–19:00NNight19:00–07:00

First four weeks of the 2-2-3 Panama, 12 people rota
Team	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
Week 1, from 2026-08-24
Team A	D	D	·	·	D	D	D
Team B	·	·	D	D	·	·	·
Team C	N	N	·	·	N	N	N
Team D	·	·	N	N	·	·	·
Week 2, from 2026-08-31
Team A	·	·	D	D	·	·	·
Team B	D	D	·	·	D	D	D
Team C	·	·	N	N	·	·	·
Team D	N	N	·	·	N	N	N
Week 3, from 2026-09-07
Team A	N	N	·	·	N	N	N
Team B	·	·	N	N	·	·	·
Team C	D	D	·	·	D	D	D
Team D	·	·	D	D	·	·	·
Week 4, from 2026-09-14
Team A	·	·	N	N	·	·	·
Team B	N	N	·	·	N	N	N
Team C	·	·	D	D	·	·	·
Team D	D	D	·	·	D	D	D

What this configuration costs

The ceiling and the floor of this rota are the same number. You never work more than 3 shifts in a row and you never get more than 3 days off in a row, and that symmetry is the honest reason crews warm to 2-2-3 when they first see it. It is also the constraint that does the damage. The 28-day cycle turns the whole team over from days to nights and then back again, and both turns have to fit inside a break that is 3 days at its longest. Nothing in this pattern is bigger than that. Then look at where each team's 3-day break actually sits. Team A and Team C hit theirs exactly on the turn, so the longest rest their cycle contains is spent flipping the body clock rather than resting. Team B and Team D get their 3-day break clean in the middle of a block, with the same shift type either side, and cross the turn on a shorter gap instead. The annual weekend count hides all of it. All four teams get 26 full weekends off, identical across the four, and that figure tells you nothing about which of them is rested.

Weekends, by team

The 28-day cycle divides into whole weeks, so every team gets the same 26 full weekends off and nobody can argue the rota favours anyone.

Team	Sequence	Full weekends off
Team A	DDOODDDOODDOOONNOONNNOONNOOO	26
Team B	OODDOOODDOODDDOONNOOONNOONNN	26
Team C	NNOONNNOONNOOODDOODDDOODDOOO	26
Team D	OONNOOONNOONNNOODDOOODDOODDD	26

Who runs this shape

This shape gets picked where the room can never be empty and a single operator is not acceptable: emergency dispatch floors, utility and plant control rooms, corrections units, single-site security operations, small police watches. What a headcount of 12 buys those places is a crew of 3 in the room at every hour of the year, with 6 of the 12 on duty at any moment once you count both ends of the clock. A crew of 3 survives one person stepping out to deal with something and a smaller one does not, and that is the entire argument for the number. Rotating is a separate decision layered on top of it, and it decides who your night workers are. Night work on this rota belongs to everybody: the permanent night team count is 0, and all 12 people cross into nights inside every 28-day cycle. That kills the seniority argument about who gets stuck on nights before it can start. The bill is that night work stops being a role you can staff and becomes a condition of the job. Your working-time paperwork, your health surveillance and your hiring all have to assume 12 night workers rather than a named few.

What breaks first

Swaps are where this rota goes wrong, and it goes wrong quietly. Both halves of the 28-day cycle are drawn in the same shape, so "take my Wednesday and I will take yours" can read as a straight like-for-like trade on the roster while one person is in the day half and the other is in the night half. Wave it through and one of them comes off a night shift in the morning and starts a day shift the same morning, with no gap at all. Make the swap rule compare where each person sits in the cycle rather than which date is on the request, and have the roster refuse the trade, because the people asking are looking at a grid that gives them no reason to doubt it. Team assignment is the other one. Your 4 teams are not 4 independent pools of dates. Team A and Team C are on every one of the same dates all year, one at each end of the clock, and they trade ends at the halfway point of the cycle. Team B and Team D are paired the same way. So moving somebody from Team A to Team C leaves every date they work untouched and flips only their clock, while moving them from Team A to Team B rewrites their entire calendar and leaves their clock alone. In a rostering tool both are the same administrative action. To the person and their household they are nothing alike.

Questions

How many people do you need to run a 2-2-3 shift schedule?

The pattern fixes the team count at 4, so the only number you actually choose is how many people sit in a team, and a headcount of 12 makes that 3. On every date one of the 4 teams is on days and one is on nights, which puts 6 of the 12 on duty and 3 of them in the room at any moment. Check one thing before settling on 12: this is the rotating version, so all 12 have to be people who can work nights, not only the ones who would volunteer for them.

How many weekends off do you get on a 2-2-3 rota?

26 a year, and the figure is the same for Team A, Team B, Team C and Team D, so nobody can point at the annual total and say they drew the short straw. Across 13 cycles that lands as every other weekend. What the total will not tell you is what the weekend is doing, because the 3-day break sits on the turn between days and nights for Team A and Team C, and clean in the middle of a block for Team B and Team D. Only one of those is rest you get to keep.

Is the Panama schedule the same as 2-2-3?

Yes. Panama, Panama shift pattern and 2-2-3 rotation all name the same cadence, and the grid here is the rotating version of it: each team works the 2-2-3 shape on days, then the identical shape on nights, which is what stretches the cycle to 28 days. If you find 2-2-3 described with a shorter cycle and permanent day and night teams, that is the fixed variant, usually called Pitman. Same rhythm, different rota, and a very different conversation about who works nights.

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