4 on 4 off schedule

What the 4 on 4 off schedule is

Four shifts on, four days off, repeating. Each shift is twelve hours, so four crews cover a post continuously.

Many agencies extend it to a sixteen-day cycle by working four days, taking four off, working four nights, then taking four off — which is the version drawn below. Others keep crews on a fixed tour, making the cycle a straight eight days.

It is the easiest rotation to explain to someone who doesn't work shifts, and the hardest to explain to a calendar, because it never lines up with the seven-day week.

How the cycle runs

The sixteen-day version, rotating from days to nights:

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

The drift

Because eight and sixteen don't divide into seven, your days off walk through the week. A block that falls on the weekend this month falls midweek the next.

This is the defining practical problem of 4 on 4 off. You cannot answer "am I off on the twelfth?" from memory the way a Panama worker can — the pattern has to be projected forward from a known start day, which is precisely the arithmetic a calendar should be doing for you.

Hours and overtime

Four twelve-hour shifts every eight days works out to forty-eight hours in each block, averaging forty-two hours a week over the cycle.

Some agencies shorten one shift or add a scheduled day off to bring the average closer to forty. Others simply pay the overtime.

Who works it

It is one of the most widely used 24/7 patterns anywhere:

• Municipal, regional and RCMP patrol
• Security and guarding
• Oil, gas and refining
• Manufacturing and process plants
• Hospital departments
• Airport and transport operations

The trade-off

Put it on your calendar

Four on, four off never lines up with a week, so your days off walk through the calendar and no two months look alike.

Save it once and the pattern keeps walking on its own — forward for the leave request, back over what you have 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.

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 12-hour rotation that established day is 12-hour, so the ceiling is 12-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 consecutive hours off between shifts is the ESA minimum and it applies whatever the pattern. A 12-hour shift leaves 12 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 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.

Four and four in Canada

A twelve-hour four-and-four does not divide into a forty-hour week, which means the number of hours in a full-time year on this rotation is set by the cycle rather than by a standard week. If you are converting between an hourly rate and an annual salary, use the figure your own pay grid is written against — assuming 2,080 will give you the wrong answer on a twelve-hour rotation.

Check the shift length before you compare two of these

Four and four is not always four twelves. The same pattern is run at eleven hours in some services, and the hour matters more than it sounds: four twelves is 48 hours in the block, four elevens is 44. Across a year that is the difference between a roster that needs scheduled days off to bring the average down and one that largely does not.

So a four-and-four in one service and a four-and-four in another can be materially different jobs. The shift length is in your agreement; compare that first.

Checked 7 August 2026. Quoted from the collective agreements, statutes and regulators named above. Agreements are renegotiated and employment standards are amended — confirm the current text before relying on a figure or a threshold.

Common questions

How many hours a week is 4 on 4 off?

About forty-two, averaged across the cycle — four twelve-hour shifts in every eight-day block.

Do I get every other weekend off?

No. Because the cycle doesn't divide into seven days, the days off move through the week rather than repeating on fixed weekdays.

How many days off a year does 4 on 4 off give?

Roughly half the year is off duty, though those days fall in blocks rather than in weekends.