Kelly schedule

What the Kelly schedule is

The Kelly covers a station with three platoons working twenty-four hour tours. A platoon works a tour, takes a day off, works another, takes a day off, works a third, then takes four consecutive days off.

Nine days from start to repeat. It is the most widely used firefighting rotation in North America and turns up in EMS and some RCMP operations that staff twenty-four hour posts.

The four-day break at the end of the cycle is what people stay for.

How the cycle runs

One nine-day cycle for a single platoon:

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

Kelly Days in policing

In police departments, "Kelly Day" often means something else entirely — a scheduled day off inserted into a rotation to bring average weekly hours down to the contracted figure.

An agency running a pattern that would otherwise average forty-four hours a week might grant a Kelly Day every few weeks to pull the average back to forty. It is a correction built into the cycle rather than a rotation in its own right, and it is easy to lose track of, because it doesn't repeat on the same rhythm as the underlying pattern.

Hours and overtime

Three twenty-four hour tours every nine days averages fifty-six hours a week — far above a standard week, which is why the fire service has its own federal work-period rules.

Those rules are why hour tracking on this schedule matters more, not less, than on a forty-hour pattern.

Who works it

Twenty-four hour tours belong to a specific set of operations:

• Fire departments
• EMS and ambulance services
• Some RCMP and corrections posts
• Airport rescue and firefighting
• Industrial fire brigades
• Remote-site emergency cover

The trade-off

Put it on your calendar

Nine days, twenty-four hour tours, and a Kelly day that moves through the week.

Save it once and you can see which tours you are on next month without counting from the last one.

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 56 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

What is a Kelly Day?

In the fire service it refers to the day off inside the Kelly rotation. In policing it usually means a scheduled day off added to a rotation to bring average weekly hours down to the contracted number.

How long is the Kelly cycle?

Nine days — three twenty-four hour tours, each followed by a day off, then four days off together.

How many hours a week is the Kelly schedule?

About fifty-six on average, which is why it falls under different work-period rules than a standard forty-hour schedule.