DDNNOO rota for 6 people: three teams of two at 56 hours a week

Three teams of two run one line each: DDNNOO, OODDNN, NNOODD. Stack them and every date in the grid below carries 2 people on the day shift and 2 on the night shift. 4 of your 6 are working at any point, the other 2 are off, and that split holds on all 366 days.

The hours follow from that density. Each person works four 12-hour shifts inside every 6-day cycle, which comes out at 56 hours a week. Rotas built on longer cycles set a heavy block against a light one so the average lands below what any single week feels like. A 6-day cycle has nowhere to put a lighter week. The cycle repeats 61 times across the grid, and what the first week looks like is what the year looks like.

The name is the block written out: two days, then two nights, then off. The switch from days to nights happens inside the working stretch rather than between stretches, and on 12-hour shifts that is a full inversion in one step. You come off a day shift in the evening and your next shift starts the following evening, at the hour the last one ended.

People

3 teams of 2

Hours a week

12-hour shifts

Cycle

6 days

61 cycles in the grid

On duty

every day of the cycle

Take the grid

366 dated days, 61 complete cycles, starting 2026-08-24 and ending 2027-08-24. 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

The first four weeks

Each row is a week, each cell a team's shift on that date. The full 366-day grid is in the download.

DDay07:00–19:00NNight19:00–07:00

First four weeks of the DDNNOO, 6 people rota
Team	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
Week 1, from 2026-08-24
Team A	D	D	N	N	·	·	D
Team B	·	·	D	D	N	N	·
Team C	N	N	·	·	D	D	N
Week 2, from 2026-08-31
Team A	D	N	N	·	·	D	D
Team B	·	D	D	N	N	·	·
Team C	N	·	·	D	D	N	N
Week 3, from 2026-09-07
Team A	N	N	·	·	D	D	N
Team B	D	D	N	N	·	·	D
Team C	·	·	D	D	N	N	·
Week 4, from 2026-09-14
Team A	N	·	·	D	D	N	N
Team B	D	N	N	·	·	D	D
Team C	·	D	D	N	N	·	·

What this configuration costs

Start with the weekends, because that is the number your crew will check first. Across the 366-day grid, Team A gets 8 full weekends off and Teams B and C get 9. The three lines are not identical, but the difference between the best and the worst is not something you can offer anybody. There is no favoured line to reward people with and no punished line to compensate, which sounds fair and mostly means you have lost the lever managers reach for when a rota gets unpopular. The second cost is that 2 days is not this pattern's short break. It is the longest break in it. The rest period is the same 2 days on all 61 repeats, and it always lands straight off the back of a night rather than off a day shift, because the block always ends on nights.

Weekends, by team

A 6-day cycle does not divide into a seven-day week, so the teams do not get the same number of full weekends off. Over this grid the spread runs from 8 to 9, and it does not even out later: the team that starts behind stays behind.

Team	Sequence	Full weekends off
Team A	DDNNOO	8
Team B	OODDNN	9
Team C	NNOODD	9

Who runs this shape

Before asking who else runs DDNNOO, check whether your demand looks like the rota's assumption about it. This grid puts 4 people on duty at every hour of every date and never more or fewer, and it splits them evenly: a pair on days, a pair on nights, as though the night carries the same load as the day. That fits work that is presence rather than volume, where something has to be watched, answered or kept running and the amount of it barely moves between the day shift and the night shift. If your nights are quiet and your days are not, DDNNOO has you paying a pair to be underused overnight while your busy hours run on the same 4, and there is no version of it that redistributes them, because 6 people split into 3 lines leaves nothing to move. Most sites on this pattern never picked it off a list of alternatives. They had 6 people and a clock to cover, and 3 lines of 2 is what those two facts produce.

What breaks first

The unit here is the team, not the person. Both members of a team work the same 4 shifts in the same order every cycle, so you cannot put an individual on the shift that needs them without moving their whole line. That bites hardest on scarce competence. Every team takes nights inside every cycle, so a qualification, a licence or a language held inside one team goes missing from the grid on the 2 days that team is off, and your coverage count will not warn you: the date still reads 4 on duty while the work it has to do goes uncovered. Leave is the other thing to price properly. A week away covers a whole cycle plus one more day, and whether that extra day is a shift depends on where the request lands, so two people asking for the same week are not asking for the same amount of cover. Count leave in shifts rather than in days, and keep the two members of a team from being away together, because that does not thin the grid, it removes a line from it.

Questions

How many hours a week is a DDNNOO rota with 6 people?

56 hours, in every week, for all 6 people. Each person works four 12-hour shifts inside a 6-day cycle, and that cycle repeats 61 times across the 366-day grid on this page. The figure is a level rather than a peak. 56 is what an ordinary week on this rota looks like, and the grid below shows it landing that way in every week of the year.

Do all 3 teams get the same weekends off on a DDNNOO rota?

Almost, and not quite. Across the 366-day grid Team A gets 8 full Saturday and Sunday pairs off, Team B gets 9 and Team C gets 9. The pattern spreads the weekend shortage across the lines instead of parking it on one of them, so moving somebody between teams is not a way to give them more weekends. If weekends are what your crew cares about, the honest answer is that the pattern or the headcount has to change, not the seating plan, and it is better to say that before you adopt DDNNOO than after.

Why does a DDNNOO rota use 3 teams?

3 lines is the fewest that can fill a 12-hour day shift and a 12-hour night shift and still leave somebody off, and with 6 people it is also as many lines as you can build while keeping 2 on each shift. That is why the cycle is 6 days: 2 days on the day shift, 2 on nights, 2 off, then the next line takes its turn. A fourth line is the real answer to 56 hours, but it is a hiring decision rather than a rota change. Anything you rearrange inside these 6 people moves the same hours somewhere else.

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