DuPont rota for 16 people: 4 teams of 4 on 12-hour shifts

This is the DuPont schedule sized for 16 people: 4 teams of 4 on 12-hour shifts, a 28-day cycle, and 13 repeats of it across the 364 dated days below. All 4 teams run the identical sequence. Team B starts it a week behind Team A, Team C a week behind Team B, Team D a week behind Team C, which is why almost nothing on this page needs qualifying by team.

Each team's line opens with 4 nights and closes with 4 days, with a shorter day block and a shorter night block in between, and then everything stops for 7 days. Those 4-day runs are the longest work stretches in the pattern, and they bracket the break on both sides.

Coverage does not move. Peak and trough on duty are both 8 on every date in the grid, a team of 4 on days and a team of 4 on nights, and hours come out at 42 a week averaged across the 28-day cycle.

People

4 teams of 4

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 DuPont, 16 people rota
Team	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
Week 1, from 2026-08-24
Team A	N	N	N	N	·	·	·
Team B	·	·	·	·	·	·	·
Team C	·	·	·	D	D	D	D
Team D	D	D	D	·	N	N	N
Week 2, from 2026-08-31
Team A	D	D	D	·	N	N	N
Team B	N	N	N	N	·	·	·
Team C	·	·	·	·	·	·	·
Team D	·	·	·	D	D	D	D
Week 3, from 2026-09-07
Team A	·	·	·	D	D	D	D
Team B	D	D	D	·	N	N	N
Team C	N	N	N	N	·	·	·
Team D	·	·	·	·	·	·	·
Week 4, from 2026-09-14
Team A	·	·	·	·	·	·	·
Team B	·	·	·	D	D	D	D
Team C	D	D	D	·	N	N	N
Team D	N	N	N	N	·	·	·

What this configuration costs

The 7-day break is the reason anyone picks DuPont, and the rest of the 28-day cycle is built to pay for it. The bill lands in the middle of the work run. Between one break and the next sit a day block and a night block joined by the tightest gap the rotation contains: you come off days and go onto nights with almost nothing in between, at the point in the cycle furthest from the 7 days off in either direction. That gap is structural rather than an oversight. Holding 8 people on duty on every one of the 364 dates with only 4 teams commits every day of the sequence, so any rest you add to that turnaround has to be taken back out of the break. On the other side of the ledger, the break is worth a little more than it reads on the grid. It begins when a 4-day run of day shifts ends and it does not finish until a 4-day run of nights begins, so the hours in it exceed the 7 dates it occupies. That is the trade in full: a week clear, 13 times a year, bought with a turnaround every cycle that the pattern gives you no way to soften.

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	NNNNOOODDDONNNOOODDDDOOOOOOO	26
Team B	OOOOOOONNNNOOODDDONNNOOODDDD	26
Team C	OOODDDDOOOOOOONNNNOOODDDONNN	26
Team D	DDDONNNOOODDDDOOOOOOONNNNOOO	26

Who runs this shape

DuPont at 16 belongs to plants that cannot stop and where a shift needs a crew rather than a lone operator: continuous process and chemical sites, paper mills, power generation, large control rooms. What 4 people per team buys you over the leaner four-team patterns is a shift that still functions while one of them is on a course, in an incident review, or walking a contractor round the site. The 7-day break is usually the argument that settles it. It reads well in a job advert, and for people who travel a long way to work it is the difference between going home for a weekend and going home properly. The shape of the cycle helps that case: the 4-night block is the longest run of nights the pattern contains, and it starts straight out of the break rather than at the tail end of a work run.

What breaks first

Count the breaks, not the shifts. Each team should reach the end of the grid having taken all 13 of them intact, and that count is the honest test of whether you are still running the pattern you published. A week with no shifts on it reads as slack to anyone looking at the grid from outside the team, which makes it the easiest thing in the cycle to spend. It is not slack. It is the counterweight to the 4-day day block that runs into it and the 4-day night block that runs out of it, and someone who works inside their break starts those nights already down. The second thing worth tracking is what people ask you for. Requests on this pattern cluster on the mid-cycle turnaround, and you cannot grant them by moving somebody to a different team. All 4 teams run the identical 28-day sequence offset by a week, so every line holds that same turnaround, just on a different date. Taking it off one person hands it to another.

Questions

How many people do you need to run a DuPont schedule?

DuPont needs 4 teams, and this grid sizes each of them at 4, which puts 16 on the payroll. On every date in the 364-day grid, 8 of those 16 are on duty: 4 on days and 4 on nights. The other 8 are either sitting in a gap between blocks or inside a 7-day break. That is why the grid never shows a thin date and never shows an unusually busy one either.

How many hours a week is the DuPont schedule?

42 a week, averaged across the 28-day cycle, from 12-hour shifts. The word averaged is carrying weight there: the 7-day break holds no shifts at all, so every hour of the 42 is earned in the rest of the cycle. The heaviest seven days anyone works is the stretch that runs the day block, the turnaround and the night block back to back, and that stretch sits as far from the break as the cycle allows.

Does the DuPont rota give you every other weekend off?

No, although it arrives at the same total. Each team gets 26 full weekends off across the 364-day grid, and all 4 teams get exactly 26, because they are running one sequence offset by a week rather than four different ones. What they do not do is alternate. Weekends come in pairs here: a team gets consecutive weekends off, then consecutive weekends on. No team ever works half a weekend either, so a Saturday on this grid always brings the Sunday with it.

How the pattern works

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