Home › Shift work terms › off-duty detail
What is an off-duty detail?
An off-duty detail is paid work an officer takes outside their regular hours, usually in uniform: construction sites, sporting events, licensed premises, film work. It is also called extra duty, secondary employment or, in Canada, paid duty.
How the work is arranged
It varies enormously. Some agencies run a coordinator who assigns jobs; some use a booking system where officers claim postings first-come; some let businesses contact officers directly within rules the agency sets. Many officers work for several sources at once.
How it is paid
Also varies. Where the employer pays the officer directly it is usually self-employment income the officer reports themselves. Where the agency arranges and pays it, it more often runs through payroll. In Canada paid duty is generally employment income with deductions taken at source.
Why officers lose track of it
Because it arrives in pieces, from different people, and gets paid at different times. A detail worked in March might be paid in May by an employer you have worked for twice since. Without a record, the honest answer to what the year brought in is a shrug.
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 your shift schedule once and BlueShifts fills the rest of the year in.
What is worth keeping
The date, the employer, the hours you actually worked, the rate, the kilometres if it applies to you, and whether the money has arrived. That last one is the part everyone skips and the only one that answers “who still owes me?”
Where it turns up
Logging a job and what it paid · What the year adds up to · Records and the year-end report
Here it is called paid duty
The work is the same and the name is not. In Canada an officer working a uniformed job for an outside employer is on paid duty, and that is the term you will find in the agreement, on the assignment list and on your pay statement. “Detail” is American usage and will not be recognised on a Canadian service.
The difference is more than vocabulary. Paid duty in Ontario runs through the service rather than round it: the outside employer books through the police service, the service assigns from a list, and the rate is set in the collective agreement rather than by the person hiring you. Which jobs you can take depends on your rotation, because the assignment rules are written against your scheduled days.
There is a whole section of this site on how it works, who books it, and the rules that limit it — written for Canada rather than translated into it.
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.
Put your own rotation on the calendar
Save the pattern your agency runs once and the year fills itself in — forward as far as you want to look, and back over the months you have already worked.
Scan to install
