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24/48/24/96 schedule
Two twenty-four hour tours inside eight days — one tour, two days off, another, then four days clear.
Also called: 24-48-24-96, modified Kelly, 24/24/96, two tours in eight days
- Shift length
- 24 hours
- Cycle
- 8 days
- Average week
- 42 hours
- Tours
- 2 per cycle
What the 24/48/24/96 schedule is
A crew works one twenty-four hour tour, takes two days off, works a second tour, and then takes four days off. Eight days from start to repeat, with two tours inside it.
Two tours in eight days is forty-eight hours in eight days, or forty-two a week. A three-platoon 24/48 asks for about fifty-six, so the difference between them is a whole extra platoon and roughly a day a week of your life.
Departments usually arrive at it the same way they arrive at the 24/72: fatigue, recruitment, and the fact that a four-day break is worth more to most crews than the money the fourth platoon costs.
How the cycle runs
One eight-day cycle. The two faded days at the start of the calendar are the end of the previous month, not part of the pattern:
Set a start day, set the length to 8 days, and paint each one. This pattern walks, so each time round it lands on different weekdays — which the app works out for you.
Start day: 1 September 2026Days: 8
Day shiftNight shift24-hour tourDay off
Set the template once. Your days show up on every month after it.
September 2026
Print this rotation (PDF) One page — the cycle above, and a blank grid for your own dates.
Weekends off on this rotation
This cycle is 8 days, which does not divide by seven — so it drifts through the week and every squad gets much the same share. Around 25 to 27 full weekends a year, wherever you sit in it.
A year on this rotation: 27 full weekends off, spread through the calendar. A weekend counts only when both the Saturday and the Sunday are free. All 21 rotations compared →
The modified Kelly beside it
Move the second tour a day earlier and you get the arrangement most departments call a modified Kelly: on, off, on, then four days clear. Same two tours, same forty-two hours, one day between the tours instead of two.
Murray City in Utah is a worked example of both. Its fire chief told the city council the department had run that on-off-on-then-four-days-off pattern for around twenty-three years before it moved to a 48/96, and the minutes of that meeting are the record of it.
Which of the two a department runs decides how the tours feel rather than what they cost. Two days between tours is a real recovery; one day is a turnaround.
Hours and overtime
Forty-eight hours every eight days averages forty-two a week, which is a long way under the fire-protection ceiling in the Fair Labor Standards Act — 212 hours in a twenty-eight day work period.
So on this pattern the roster itself almost never generates overtime. What generates it is callbacks, holdovers, trades and details, and those are the hours that only exist if somebody wrote them down.
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Save this pattern once and the year fills itself in — forward as far as you want, and back over the months you have already worked.
Who works it
Twenty-four hour tours across four platoons rather than three:
- Fire departments
- EMS and ambulance services
- Airport rescue and firefighting
- Industrial fire brigades
- Remote-site emergency cover
- Some corrections posts
The trade-off
What works
- Four consecutive days off every cycle
- Forty-two hours a week, not fifty-six
- Only two tours in every eight days
- The long break comes round every cycle
What hurts
- Needs a fourth platoon, so it costs the city money
- Fewer scheduled hours can mean less base pay
- Still a full twenty-four hours on duty
- An eight-day cycle drifts through the week
Put it on your calendar
Two tours in eight days, arranged so the four-day break lands after the second one - and eight days never lines up with a week, so it walks.
Save the eight days once and the calendar tells you which tour you are on next month, and where the long break falls.
What Canadian law does to this rotation
The cycle is the same shape in both countries. What sits underneath it is not, and in Canada it is provincial rather than federal — so the same rotation can be worked and paid differently depending on where you are.
The daily ceiling follows your shift, not the statute. Ontario's Employment Standards Act caps the working day at eight hours or the number of hours in an established regular workday, if it is longer than eight. On a 24-hour rotation that established day is 24-hour, so the ceiling is 24-hour — the rotation itself sets it. Going past that needs a written agreement, and no agreement lets anyone be required past 60 hours in a week.
Eleven hours off between shifts is the ESA minimum, and a 24-hour tour has to be built around it rather than through it. Healthcare and emergency work can override that rest in a genuine emergency, but the time off has to be given back afterwards — it is substituted, not cancelled.
Overtime is triggered differently by province, and this rotation averages 42 hours. The weekly threshold runs from 40 hours in Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, the territories and federally, through 44 in Ontario and New Brunswick, to 48 in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Ontario and Quebec have no daily trigger at all; British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the territories have both, so exceeding 8 hours in a day counts even if the week does not. BC adds double time past 12 hours in a day. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador calculate overtime at 1.5 times the minimum wage rather than your own rate. Same roster, a different answer in almost every jurisdiction.
And one Quebec rule that catches shift workers out: premiums added to the hourly rate, such as night or evening shift premiums, are not taken into account when calculating overtime. Your overtime is worked out on the base rate, so a night premium does not carry into it.
Averaging is what makes a cycle like this work on paper. Where the pattern does not fit a calendar week, hours can be averaged over two to four weeks for the purpose of overtime, by written agreement. If you are in a union, your union can make that agreement with your employer — and in a policing or fire service it usually has, which is why your collective agreement rather than the statute is the document that decides your pay.
Two employers sit outside all of that. The RCMP works under one national agreement with the Treasury Board rather than provincial standards — its default workweek is forty hours from Monday to Friday with a workday of a minimum of eight consecutive hours, and separate articles for variable and shift work that take a detachment off that default. Federal enforcement uses a Variable Shift Schedule Arrangement, negotiated branch by branch, so two workplaces under one contract can run different rosters. In both cases the agreement is the whole answer and the province you live in does not enter into it.
Checked 7 August 2026. Provincial rules are quoted from the Employment Standards Act of the province named and, for Quebec, from the CNESST; federal provisions from the Treasury Board agreements. Employment standards are amended and collective agreements are renegotiated — check the current text before relying on a threshold or a figure.
Common questions
How many hours a week is a 24/48/24/96 schedule?
Forty-two on average — two twenty-four hour tours every eight days.
How is it different from a 24/48?
A 24/48 works one tour then two days off on a three-day cycle and averages about fifty-six hours a week. This adds a four-day break after the second tour and drops the average to forty-two.
Is the modified Kelly the same schedule?
Nearly. Both work two tours in eight days for the same forty-two hours. The modified Kelly puts one day between the two tours; this puts two.
Put the 24/48/24/96 schedule on your calendar
Save the 24/48/24/96 schedule once, tell BlueShifts the day your cycle starts, and the rest of the year draws itself. Then the paid duty work you pick up around it goes in beside the shifts.
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