Kelly rota for 9 firefighters: three platoons on 24-hour shifts

9 firefighters, 3 platoons of 3, one platoon in the station at a time. On-duty strength sits at 3 for every hour of the year because there is only ever one platoon on the floor, and the shift runs a full 24 hours from 07:00 to 07:00. The 9-day cycle repeats 41 times across the dated 369-day grid below.

You work a day, then you get 2 days, and that is the entire rhythm. The longest work stretch in the grid is 1 shift and the longest break is 2 days, so the rest never stacks into anything bigger than the gap between two duty days. Every real block of time off a firefighter gets in the year comes out of annual leave, and it costs 56 hours a week to stand the pattern up.

Saturday and Sunday are always covered by two different platoons, so on any given weekend exactly one of the 3 has both days clear and the other two each lose one of them. A 24-hour shift takes the whole calendar day plus the following morning up to the 07:00 handover with it, which means there is no half weekend on this rota. A Saturday is either completely yours or completely gone.

People

3 teams of 3

Hours a week

24-hour shifts

Cycle

9 days

41 cycles in the grid

On duty

every day of the cycle

Take the grid

369 dated days, 41 complete cycles, starting 2026-08-24 and ending 2027-08-27. Every shift is checked for coverage before the file is written, so no date in it leaves a shift unstaffed.

Download CSV Platoon A calendar Platoon B calendar Platoon C calendar

The first four weeks

Each row is a week, each cell a team's shift on that date. The full 369-day grid is in the download.

DDay07:00–07:00

First four weeks of the Kelly, 9 firefighters rota
Team	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
Week 1, from 2026-08-24
Platoon A	D	·	·	D	·	·	D
Platoon B	·	D	·	·	D	·	·
Platoon C	·	·	D	·	·	D	·
Week 2, from 2026-08-31
Platoon A	·	·	D	·	·	D	·
Platoon B	D	·	·	D	·	·	D
Platoon C	·	D	·	·	D	·	·
Week 3, from 2026-09-07
Platoon A	·	D	·	·	D	·	·
Platoon B	·	·	D	·	·	D	·
Platoon C	D	·	·	D	·	·	D
Week 4, from 2026-09-14
Platoon A	D	·	·	D	·	·	D
Platoon B	·	D	·	·	D	·	·
Platoon C	·	·	D	·	·	D	·

What this configuration costs

This rota records 0 consecutive nights, and that 0 is a measurement artifact rather than a mercy. There is no night shift to count because the night sits inside the shift. Every firefighter works every overnight they are rostered for, and how much of it they sleep is settled by the call log rather than by the roster. A fatigue policy that counts consecutive nights, caps night runs or protects the day after a night block will score this pattern as clean, because none of those rules have anything here to attach to. Rest between shifts is just as misleading: 2 full days between one shift and the next clears any minimum you can name, and it says nothing about the last hours of a 24-hour shift, which is where the tiredness on this rota actually lives. The levers that work here are inside the shift, not in the gaps between them.

Weekends, by team

A 9-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 17 to 18, and it does not even out later: the team that starts behind stays behind.

Team	Sequence	Full weekends off
Platoon A	DOODOODOO	17
Platoon B	ODOODOODO	18
Platoon C	OODOODOOD	17

Who runs this shape

This is the shape of a single-station fire department. 9 firefighters is one crew of 3 on an apparatus, tripled, and the 24-hour shift exists because the station is a place people sleep, cook and train in rather than clock into. One changeover a day means apparatus checks, keys, open incidents and station work all get passed once at 07:00 rather than repeatedly through the day, and crews who live a long way out make a single trip in for a whole day of duty. EMS services, industrial fire brigades and combination departments run the same three-platoon shape for the same reasons. What none of them get from it is flex. Peak and trough on duty are both 3, and because a single shift block covers the whole day, there is nowhere to add hands for the afternoon call peak and take them away again overnight. The crew that answers the alarm in the small hours is the crew that ran the school visit that afternoon, at exactly the same strength.

What breaks first

Cover on this rota is rarely a phone call to someone at home. It is the crew already standing in the station. With 3 in a platoon and 3 needed on duty, a gap has to be filled by the 07:00 handover or not at all, and the people reliably present at 07:00 are the platoon that has just finished. Holding one of them over means a second 24-hour shift beginning the moment the first one ends, which is the worst thing you can do to somebody on this pattern and also the easiest, because they are already there in their boots. The second thing to watch is that this rota only sells cover in whole days. You cannot backfill the afternoon of a 24-hour shift, so a firefighter who needs part of a day for an appointment either finds someone to take the entire shift or does not go. That is why departments on this pattern run on shift trades, and the trade book is the number worth reading: trades move hours between two firefighters without adding any to the station. A busy trade book looks like flexibility and is usually a staffing shortfall being settled privately between crews.

Questions

How many hours a week is a Kelly schedule?

56 hours a week per firefighter. One 24-hour shift in every 3 days is what produces that figure, and it comes out identical for all 9 people, because the 3 platoons run the same line one day apart. Payroll has to treat 56 as the normal week rather than as a normal week plus overtime, which is why fire services generally run this rota under a public-safety work-period rule instead of an ordinary weekly limit.

How many firefighters do you need to run a Kelly rota?

9, as 3 platoons of 3, which fills all 369 days of the grid with 3 firefighters on duty and no gaps. The number to understand is not 9 though, it is 3: a platoon is 3 people and the station needs 3 on duty, so the roster moves in steps of 3, one extra firefighter on each platoon, with no half-step available. It also means an absence is a 24-hour hole rather than a thinner shift, because the person missing was a third of the crew for a whole day.

How many weekends off do you get on a Kelly schedule?

Across the 369-day grid, Platoon A gets 17 full weekends off, Platoon B gets 18 and Platoon C gets 17. That is about a third of the weekends in the year, which catches out anyone who sees 2 days off after every shift and assumes most weekends come free. The turn is strict: your full weekend comes round every third weekend, never in consecutive weeks. And the extra weekend Platoon B holds is not a standing perk, it is an artifact of where the grid starts and stops. Move the start date and the spare weekend moves to another platoon.

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