4-on-3-off rota for 8 people: two squads of four

Eight people, two squads of four, one 10-hour shift running 07:00 to 17:00. Squad A works four days and takes the next three off. Squad B works the same four-on, three-off shape, offset so that its block begins on Squad A's last day. Between them the two squads cover all 7 days with no gaps, nobody works a night, and each person works 40 hours.

The offset does not give you level coverage. On all but one day of the week a single squad is in, which is 4 people. On the remaining day the two blocks overlap and all 8 of your people are on the floor together. That overlap lands on a weekday, so the day you are best staffed is not a weekend day. Saturday and Sunday run on 4, and it is the same four people every weekend.

The cycle is 7 days, which is the calendar week itself. That makes this less a rotation than a fixed weekly timetable, repeated 52 times across the 364-day grid. Your Tuesday in week 1 is your Tuesday in week 52, so nobody has to look anything up. It is an easy pattern to live with and a hard one to change, because a cycle with no rotation step has nowhere to put one.

People

2 teams of 4

Hours a week

10-hour shifts

Cycle

7 days

52 cycles in the grid

On duty

4–8

trough to peak

Take the grid

364 dated days, 52 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 Squad A calendar Squad B 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.

DDay07:00–17:00

First four weeks of the 4-on-3-off, 8 people rota
Team	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
Week 1, from 2026-08-24
Squad A	D	D	D	D	·	·	·
Squad B	·	·	·	D	D	D	D
Week 2, from 2026-08-31
Squad A	D	D	D	D	·	·	·
Squad B	·	·	·	D	D	D	D
Week 3, from 2026-09-07
Squad A	D	D	D	D	·	·	·
Squad B	·	·	·	D	D	D	D
Week 4, from 2026-09-14
Squad A	D	D	D	D	·	·	·
Squad B	·	·	·	D	D	D	D

What this configuration costs

Squad A takes 52 full weekends off across the grid. Squad B takes 0. That is not an accident of where the year starts, it is arithmetic: with a 7-day cycle, Squad A's three rest days land on the weekend and the day beside it every week, and Squad B's three land on weekdays every week. Four of your eight people get a three-day weekend 52 times a year, and the other four get none at all. A rotating pattern spreads that kind of unfairness by moving people through it, but there is no rotation step here to move anyone with and no cycle boundary where the squads trade places. Whatever gap sits between Squad A and Squad B in week 1 is the same gap in week 52. People sort themselves into tiers faster than they learn the shift times, and this tier is visible from outside work: Squad A can join a Saturday league and Squad B cannot, ever. Assigning the eight names is the real decision on this rota. The four days of work are identical either way.

Weekends, by team

A 7-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 0 to 52, and it does not even out later: the team that starts behind stays behind.

Team	Sequence	Full weekends off
Squad A	DDDDOOO	52
Squad B	OOODDDD	0

Who runs this shape

The operations that land here are open every day and closed every night: a support desk whose customers all sit inside one working day, a depot handling weekend collections, a daytime clinic, a visitor site that is busiest when everyone else is off. Nothing is staffed between 17:00 and 07:00, so anything arriving in the evening waits for the morning, and there is no night shift to thicken if that turns out to be unacceptable. The shape also assumes Sunday demand looks like an ordinary weekday's, because 4 people is what you get on both. What it buys you is cheap seven-day cover: 8 people at 40 hours, no nights to pay a premium on, and a grid a new starter understands on their first morning.

What breaks first

You have exactly one day a week with any slack in it. On the overlap day 8 people are in for work that normally runs on 4, so that is your only chance to train somebody, hold a handover with everyone present, or absorb a sick call without feeling it. On every other day a call-out takes a quarter of the people on duty off the floor, and there is no off-going shift in the building to lean on, because the other squad is not at work at all. Leave grinds the same way more slowly: a squad of 4 cannot all take August, and every leave request Squad B makes is a weekend request, because Squad B works every weekend there is. Weekends are where it turns expensive. The only people who can cover a Saturday without breaking someone else's week are Squad A, and Squad A's Saturdays are the entire reason that being in Squad A is worth anything. Buy enough of them and you have quietly put both squads on the same rota, the worse one, while the published grid still says otherwise.

Questions

Is a 4-on-3-off rota 40 hours a week?

In this configuration yes, and it is the same 40 in every week of the year: four shifts of 10 hours, on the same four days, 52 times over. That predictability is most of what the people on it like about the rota. The cost sits elsewhere. Those 40 hours buy 07:00 to 17:00 across all 7 days from 8 people, and nothing at all outside that window.

Does a 4-on-3-off rota staff every day equally?

No, and it is the part people miss when they sketch it out on paper. Two four-day blocks cannot fit inside a 7-day week without overlapping, so staffing sits at 4 on most days and jumps to 8 on one. Peak and trough on this rota are 8 and 4. That spike is worth something if your busiest day is underneath it and worth nothing if you leave it wherever the offset happens to drop it. The weekend sits at the trough either way.

Who works the weekends on a 4-on-3-off rota?

Squad B, every weekend of the year, while Squad A has all 52 of them off. The schedule repeats identically, so whoever is in Squad B in week 1 is still working Saturdays in week 52 unless you change something by hand. Two answers are honest. Recruit for it, advertising Squad B as weekend roles with weekdays off and paying accordingly, which genuinely suits some people. Or swap the squads at a fixed point in the year and reissue both calendars, accepting that you are moving people's whole week rather than their shifts. What fails is leaving it unstated and hoping the two halves of an 8-person team never compare notes.

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