7-on-7-off rota for 8 nurses, with two permanent night teams

Eight nurses, four teams of two, 12-hour shifts. Teams A and B take the day post in alternating weeks. Teams C and D do the same on nights and never appear on a day shift. Four people are rostered on any date in the grid, but they are never in the building together: two hold 07:00 to 19:00 and two hold 19:00 to 07:00, so the floor runs on a pair at any given hour.

The block is a full week, so one pair owns seven consecutive day shifts and then hands the whole week over at once. A patient admitted on a Tuesday sees the same two nurses until the following Tuesday and then sees neither of them for seven days. On an inpatient floor that continuity is the point of the pattern. It also loads one handover with everything, because the day line and the night line turn over on the same boundary, so every seventh day all four people who know the patients are replaced together.

Christmas, New Year and every other fixed date already belongs to a named team before you publish anything, and belongs to the same team the year after unless you break the cycle on purpose. That is what the 364 dated days below are for. Not the shape of the pattern, which anyone can hold in their head after a fortnight, but which of the four teams owns which week. Every team gets the same 26 full weekends off, and none of them arrives on its own, because each one sits inside a seven-day break.

People

4 teams of 2

Hours a week

12-hour shifts

Cycle

14 days

26 cycles in the grid

On duty

every day of the cycle

Take the grid

364 dated days, 26 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 (days) calendar Team B (days) calendar Team C (nights) calendar Team D (nights) 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 7-on-7-off, 8 nurses rota
Team	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
Week 1, from 2026-08-24
Team A (days)	D	D	D	D	D	D	D
Team B (days)	·	·	·	·	·	·	·
Team C (nights)	N	N	N	N	N	N	N
Team D (nights)	·	·	·	·	·	·	·
Week 2, from 2026-08-31
Team A (days)	·	·	·	·	·	·	·
Team B (days)	D	D	D	D	D	D	D
Team C (nights)	·	·	·	·	·	·	·
Team D (nights)	N	N	N	N	N	N	N
Week 3, from 2026-09-07
Team A (days)	D	D	D	D	D	D	D
Team B (days)	·	·	·	·	·	·	·
Team C (nights)	N	N	N	N	N	N	N
Team D (nights)	·	·	·	·	·	·	·
Week 4, from 2026-09-14
Team A (days)	·	·	·	·	·	·	·
Team B (days)	D	D	D	D	D	D	D
Team C (nights)	·	·	·	·	·	·	·
Team D (nights)	N	N	N	N	N	N	N

What this configuration costs

Seven 12-hour shifts back to back is the longest work stretch in the pattern, and it is what funds the longest break. Nobody arrives on day seven the way they arrived on day one, and on a nursing floor that shows up as slower charting and more re-checking rather than as anything that reaches an incident report. The heavier cost lands on Teams C and D. Because nights are fixed, they work seven of them in a row, which is long enough for a body clock to genuinely turn over, and then they take seven days off, which is long enough for it to turn back. A night nurse whose break is short can stay nocturnal through it. Nobody stays nocturnal through a week off, because a week off contains a family, a weekend and daylight. So the night teams turn their sleeping hours over and back again inside every one of the 26 cycles in the grid, while the grid draws their block and the day teams' block as exactly the same shape. Fixed nights are usually sold as the humane option, and on short blocks they are. At seven on and seven off, the fixed team is the one doing the most adjusting.

Weekends, by team

The 14-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 (days)	DDDDDDDOOOOOOO	26
Team B (days)	OOOOOOODDDDDDD	26
Team C (nights)	NNNNNNNOOOOOOO	26
Team D (nights)	OOOOOOONNNNNNN	26

Who runs this shape

Seven on, seven off is the standard hospitalist shape, and it spreads from there into small inpatient units, hospice and residential floors, dialysis units and specialty wards. What those places have in common is that continuity is worth more to them than flexibility. A patient staying a fortnight is looked after by two nurses on days and two on nights rather than by whoever the roster produced that morning, and the discharge is handled by someone who was there for the admission. Hiring is the other reason it survives. An eight-nurse unit is not going to outbid a regional system on base pay, and the alternating week off is the one thing it can offer that a large employer's shift pool cannot match. The commute happens seven times in a fortnight and then stops entirely. Nurses coming from a system that rosters them in scattered single shifts will take less money for that, and they will say so in the interview.

What breaks first

Look hard at what the off week is worth to you, because you will spend some of it and it does not spend in small amounts. Asking for a single 12-hour shift inside a seven-day break is not the minor favour it is on a rota built from short gaps. For a day nurse it takes a day that had been written off completely, and for Team C or D it means turning a week over that they have just finished turning over. Expect refusals here that would look unreasonable on another pattern and are not unreasonable on this one. The other claim on that week is not yours. Seven free days in a row is enough to hold a per diem contract or a second job, and a 14-day cycle turns that into a standing arrangement rather than an occasional one. Two things follow that you care about: some of your nurses are not reluctant to be called, they are already at work somewhere else, and a few will start their on-week carrying hours that never appear on your roster. Ask people plainly what they do in the week you do not schedule them. It is the one part of this pattern you cannot read off the grid.

Questions

How many hours a week is a 7-on-7-off nursing rota?

42, as a fortnightly average: seven 12-hour shifts in the on-week and nothing in the off-week. Because the cycle is exactly 14 days, it lines up with a two-week pay period in a way most continuous patterns do not, so every pay period holds the same seven shifts for every nurse. That makes the rota easy to check and hard to bend. There is no lighter week anywhere in the 364 days to move an extra shift, a training day or a mandatory update into.

Do the night nurses ever move onto days?

Not without a vacancy. Nights are fixed, so Teams C and D divide every night of the year between them and never work 07:00 to 19:00, while Teams A and B never work a night. The practical consequence is that there is no one-off swap between the day side and the night side on this rota. The smallest unit anyone can trade is a whole week, because that is the size of the block. You can share the night load by moving whole teams between the day and night lines at a cycle boundary, but that removes the one thing the night teams get in return, which is knowing permanently and in advance which half of the clock they belong to.

How does annual leave work on a 7-on-7-off rota?

Only the on-week costs anything. Leave booked into the off week takes nothing off the roster and gives the nurse nothing they did not already have, so a fortnight away costs the same seven shifts as a week away. Your staff will work that out quickly, so plan for requests to arrive as whole weeks rather than as days. The binding constraint is team size. With two nurses to a team, approving one week of leave leaves the other nurse holding seven consecutive shifts alone unless you have arranged something, so the number you actually need to set is how many of the four teams may run short in the same week.

How the pattern works

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