8 on 6 off schedule

What the 8 on 6 off schedule is

Eight ten-hour shifts back to back, then six days off. Fourteen days from start to repeat.

Because the cycle is exactly a fortnight it lands on the same weekdays every time, and the six-day break covers a full weekend — so every other weekend is off, permanently, without anyone arranging it.

Eighty hours across fourteen days is forty a week, which is a standard full-time average arranged very unusually.

How the cycle runs

One fourteen-day cycle:

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

Eight in a row

Eight consecutive shifts is the longest run of any pattern on this site. Nothing else asks for more than seven, and most stop at four.

What it buys is six days clear, which is closer to a holiday than a weekend. Officers who work it tend to talk about the back half of the run and the front half of the break, because both are unlike anything a five-and-two produces.

It is a fair trade or a bad one depending almost entirely on how you sleep in the last three shifts.

Hours and the work period

Eight ten-hour shifts a fortnight averages forty hours a week — fifty in the first week of the cycle and thirty in the second.

That fifty-hour week is where the work period definition matters, since a standard weekly threshold and a twenty-eight day law enforcement work period treat it very differently.

Who works it

Agencies running ten-hour tours on a fortnight cycle:

• Municipal police patrol
• RCMP patrol divisions
• Larger metropolitan agencies
• Dispatch centres
• Corrections
• Traffic and specialist units

The trade-off

Put it on your calendar

Working it out by hand is where the mistakes happen.

Save the pattern once and BlueShifts fills the calendar in, forward and back.

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 10-hour rotation that established day is 10-hour, so the ceiling is 10-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 10-hour shift leaves 14 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 8 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 40 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 8 on 6 off?

Forty on average — fifty in the working week, thirty in the other.

Do I get every other weekend off?

Yes. The fourteen-day cycle lands on the same weekdays each time, and the six-day break covers a full weekend.

Which agencies use it?

It is a ten-hour patrol pattern; Oklahoma City Police Department publishes it on its own recruiting site.