4 on 2 off schedule

What the 4 on 2 off schedule is

Four eight-hour shifts, then two days off, over and over. Six days from start to repeat on a fixed tour, twelve if you flip between days and nights halfway through.

Three squads cover the clock — days, swings and nights — and most agencies wrap the pattern in a six-week rotation so each squad takes a turn on every watch.

It has been in service longer than almost any other police rotation, and it survives because it is simple to staff and leaves nobody working more than four shifts in a row.

How the cycle runs

The twelve-day version, four days then four nights:

Print this rotation (PDF) One page — the cycle above, and a blank grid for your own dates.

The two-day break is the weak point

Two days off after four shifts is enough to catch up on sleep and not much else. On a night tour it is barely enough for that, because the first day back is mostly spent resetting.

The other cost is drift. A six-day cycle never lines up with a seven-day week, so your days off walk through it and a standing Thursday commitment gets worked most of the time.

Hours and overtime

Four eight-hour shifts every six days averages about thirty-seven hours a week — under a standard forty, which is unusual and one reason agencies like it.

In practice the gap gets filled with overtime, court and details, so the hours you actually work and the hours on the roster are rarely the same number.

Who works it

The pattern belongs to eight-hour operations with three watches to fill:

• Municipal police services
• RCMP detachments
• Dispatch centres
• Corrections
• Campus and transit police
• Security operations

The trade-off

Put it on your calendar

Four on, two off is a six-day cycle laid over a seven-day week, so your days off drift by one every time round.

Save the pattern once and the drift takes care of itself — forward for planning, back over the months already worked.

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.

Eleven consecutive hours off between shifts is the ESA minimum and it applies whatever the pattern. A 8-hour shift leaves 16 hours before the next one is due, so this cycle clears it — but a held-over shift or a court appearance on the turnaround eats straight into that margin.

The weekly rest rule is the one long runs meet. The ESA requires at least 24 consecutive hours off in each work week, or 48 consecutive hours off in every period of two consecutive work weeks. This cycle runs 4 shifts back to back, so it is the two-week version that has to carry it.

Overtime is triggered differently by province, and this rotation averages 37.3 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 4 on 2 off?

About thirty-seven on average — four eight-hour shifts every six days.

Do you get weekends off on a 4 on 2 off schedule?

Only when the cycle lands there. Six days does not divide into seven, so the days off move through the week.

How many squads does it need?

Three for eight-hour coverage — one on days, one on swings, one on nights — usually rotating through all three over a longer cycle.