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Pitman schedule
The same two on, two off, three on cadence as Panama — but your crew stays on days or stays on nights instead of rotating between them.
Also called: 2-2-3 12-hour, Pitman fixed, Pitman rotating, Pitman days, Pitman nights
- Shift length
- 12 hours
- Cycle
- 14 days
- Average week
- 42 hours
- Tour
- Fixed
What the Pitman schedule is
Pitman runs the 2-2-3 rotation — two on, two off, three on, two off, two on, three off — on twelve-hour shifts across a fourteen-day cycle.
The difference from Panama is what happens to your tour. Under Pitman, a crew is assigned to days or to nights and stays there. The on-off rhythm rotates; the time of day does not.
For a lot of officers this is the better arrangement. A permanent night crew can build a sleep schedule and actually keep it, instead of resetting their body clock every few weeks.
How the cycle runs
Fourteen days on a fixed night tour. A day crew works the identical pattern, twelve hours earlier:
Set a start day, set the length to 14 days, and paint each one. Only the first cycle is painted — the app repeats it from there.
Start day: 30 August 2026Days: 14
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 14 days, which divides by seven — so it lands on the same weekdays for ever and never drifts. Which weekends you get is decided by your squad, not by the pattern. Across the squads the answer runs from 0 weekends a year to 26.
A squad that does well on this rotation: 26 full weekends across a year. A weekend counts only when both the Saturday and the Sunday are free. All 21 rotations compared →
Hours and overtime
Seven twelve-hour shifts per fortnight — eighty-four hours, averaging forty-two a week, alternating thirty-six and forty-eight.
Because the tour never changes, shift differential is predictable: a night crew earns it on every scheduled shift rather than on some blocks and not others.
Who works it
Pitman is common wherever agencies found that rotating tours cost them more in fatigue than it gained in fairness:
- Municipal, regional and RCMP patrol
- Emergency communications
- Corrections
- Hospital and EMS crews
- Utilities and control rooms
- Security operations
The trade-off
What works
- Your body clock gets to settle — no flipping between days and nights
- Same days off every fortnight, indefinitely
- Predictable shift differential
- Paid duty work is easier to commit to when your tour never moves
What hurts
- A permanent night tour carries real long-term health costs
- Day and night crews rarely see each other
- Twelve-hour shifts, three in a row at the peak of the cycle
- Court dates land in your sleep window if you work nights
BlueShifts. Plan Your Year. Own Your Time.
The shift calendar built for your rotation, off-duty work, and life on and off the clock.
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.
Put it on your calendar
Your crew stays on days or on nights, so the part that shifts is which days you are on — and every third weekend is yours.
Save the cycle once and those weekends show up months out, which is what you need when someone asks you about a wedding in April.
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 3 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.
Common questions
What's the difference between Pitman and Panama?
The on-off pattern is identical. Pitman keeps a crew on a fixed tour — always days or always nights — while Panama rotates crews between the two.
Is Pitman the same as 2-2-3?
2-2-3 describes the cadence. Pitman is that cadence worked on a fixed tour.
How far ahead can I know my Pitman days off?
Indefinitely. The cycle is exactly two weeks, so your days off repeat on the same weekdays for as long as you stay on the crew.
Put the Pitman schedule on your calendar
Save the Pitman schedule once, tell BlueShifts the day your cycle starts, and the rest of the year draws itself. Leave, court and the work you take on your own time go in around it.
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