Pitman rota for 8 people: the fixed-shift version of 2-2-3

Pitman is the 2-2-3 cadence with the rotation taken out. Four teams of two, 12-hour shifts, 8 people in total: Teams A and B share the day post between them, Teams C and D share the nights and never appear in daylight. Each team's fortnight is built from blocks of 2 and 3, in order: work 2, off 2, work 3, off 2, work 2, off 3. Nothing in the pattern runs longer than 3 days in either direction, and the hours average 42 a week across the 14.

There are really only two lines in the grid. Teams A and C run one of them, one on days and one on nights. Teams B and D run its exact inverse. So the site is never staffed by a mixture of teams: for 2 or 3 days at a time half your roster holds the whole clock, then hands the whole clock to the other half. On duty is 4 on every date, 2 on days and 2 on nights, with 0 gaps.

The grid below runs 26 cycles across 364 dates with each of the four teams on its own line. At this size the useful part is not the cycle, which people learn in a fortnight, but the dates: which half of the roster is in on a given Tuesday, and which two of them are in on it at night.

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 Pitman, 8 people rota
Team	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
Week 1, from 2026-08-24
Team A (days)	D	D	·	·	D	D	D
Team B (days)	·	·	D	D	·	·	·
Team C (nights)	N	N	·	·	N	N	N
Team D (nights)	·	·	N	N	·	·	·
Week 2, from 2026-08-31
Team A (days)	·	·	D	D	·	·	·
Team B (days)	D	D	·	·	D	D	D
Team C (nights)	·	·	N	N	·	·	·
Team D (nights)	N	N	·	·	N	N	N
Week 3, from 2026-09-07
Team A (days)	D	D	·	·	D	D	D
Team B (days)	·	·	D	D	·	·	·
Team C (nights)	N	N	·	·	N	N	N
Team D (nights)	·	·	N	N	·	·	·
Week 4, from 2026-09-14
Team A (days)	·	·	D	D	·	·	·
Team B (days)	D	D	·	·	D	D	D
Team C (nights)	·	·	N	N	·	·	·
Team D (nights)	N	N	·	·	N	N	N

What this configuration costs

All four teams get 26 full weekends off, and that even split is the one thing this rota distributes perfectly. It is also the number that flatters it most, because two of those four teams are night teams. A 3-day break is too short to be worth turning yourself around for and long enough to spoil the adaptation you had, so what lands in the night pair's column is daytime handed to people living on night time. Team A and Team C are off the same weekend and the count against their names is identical. What the weekend is worth to each of them is not. The rest of the cost is that 3 is the ceiling in both directions at once. Nobody works more than 3 shifts in a row, which is the gentlest thing about the pattern, and nobody gets more than 3 days off in a row, which is the hardest. There is no week hiding anywhere in the 14, so the alternating long weekend is at once the best rest this rota contains and the only rest it contains. For the night teams there is also no end to it. A rotating pattern finishes a night block by moving you somewhere else. Here the block finishes and the next one starts the same way, for as long as you hold the seat.

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)	DDOODDDOODDOOO	26
Team B (days)	OODDOOODDOODDD	26
Team C (nights)	NNOONNNOONNOOO	26
Team D (nights)	OONNOOONNOONNN	26

Who runs this shape

Almost nobody picks Pitman first. It is where you land after running the rotating build of the same cadence and deciding the flips are what is doing the damage, or after your night crew stopped rotating in practice and you chose to write down what was already true. The substantive reason to fix rather than rotate is that the night job is frequently not the day job with the lights off. Where the day pair handles whatever arrives and the night pair runs the work that can only happen when nobody else is on site, rotating everyone through both means training everyone for both, while Pitman lets a pair get good at one thing. Handover reinforces that, because a team never changes shift: the day pair and the night pair on the same line pass the site to each other twice a day for as long as they both hold their seats. The test before you commit is whether the 4 people on nights want to be on nights. If they do, fixing the shift costs you nothing you were not already spending. If they do not, Pitman does not create that problem, it makes it permanent and writes it into the team names.

What breaks first

Pitman makes a promise the rotating patterns do not: the shift in your team name is the shift you work, permanently. Almost everything that goes wrong here goes wrong by breaking that promise once. The first night one of the four night people is out, the obvious move is to put a day person on it, and that move stays available every time afterwards. Nobody objects the first time. By the third you are running a rotating rota with fixed team names on it, and the people who took a permanent night seat specifically so they would never do a turnaround have lost the one thing they were given. The slower failure is the seat itself. With 2 people to a team and the shift fixed for good, the route out of nights is a day seat coming free, which means waiting for somebody to resign. Run it for a couple of years and your night teams are made of whoever could not get out, and it reaches you as a retention problem rather than a scheduling one. Both of those are harder to spot because of how the roster splits: A and C are in while B and D are off, the two halves swap every 2 or 3 days and overlap only at handover, so there is no moment in the 14-day cycle when all 8 people are in the same room. Who gets the next day seat, and how you keep two halves that never meet working the same way, are the questions this pattern hands you. The grid answers neither.

Questions

What is the difference between a Pitman schedule and a Panama or 2-2-3 schedule?

They are the same cadence with a different answer to one question. Both work in blocks of 2 and 3 days on 12-hour shifts and both hand out a long weekend every other week. The rotating build, usually sold as Panama or 2-2-3, sends every team through days and then through nights, so its cycle has to be long enough to hold both halves. Pitman assigns the shift once and never revisits it, so the cycle closes at 14 days and repeats 26 times across the 364-day grid. The practical difference is where the night hours sit. On the rotating version everybody is a night worker some of the time. On Pitman, 2 of the 4 teams are night workers all of the time, which is 4 of your 8 people, and the other 4 never work a night at all.

Do the day teams and night teams get the same weekends off on a Pitman rota?

The count is identical: all four teams get 26 full weekends off, one every other week, and each one is a 3-day break rather than 2. What differs is who gets them together. Team A and Team C run the same line, one on days and one on nights, so they are always off the same weekend, and Teams B and D are off the others. Half your roster is away at once while the other half holds both the day post and the night post. Plan leave against those pairings rather than against a headcount of 8, because losing somebody from a working pair on a weekend the other pair is away is a different problem from losing one of 8.

How many nights in a row do you work on a Pitman rota?

Three, and it never gets longer than that. Inside each 14-day cycle a night team works 2 nights, then 3, then 2, with 2 or 3 days off between those blocks, so nobody is ever deep into a long run of nights. What makes Pitman hard on night workers is not the length of the block but the fact that there is always another one 2 or 3 days later, with nothing in the 14 days that moves anyone off nights and no point in the year at which it stops. If the problem you are trying to solve is consecutive nights, this pattern already solves it. If the problem is how long a person spends being a night worker, it does the opposite.

How the pattern works

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