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What is a compressed work schedule?
A compressed work schedule fits your contracted hours into fewer, longer days. Four ten-hour days instead of five eights is the best known version; nine-hour days with a day off every other week and twelve-hour rotations are the others.
The three common versions
4/10. Four ten-hour days, three days off, every week. The most common compressed schedule in American law enforcement.
9/80. Nine-hour days with a day off every other week — eighty hours across a fortnight rather than a week.
Twelve-hour rotations. Not usually called compressed, but they do the same thing more aggressively: fewer days at the cost of longer ones.
What you gain and what it costs
You gain days. A 4/10 buys you a third day off every week, which is a genuinely different life from a five-day week. What it costs is the length of the day itself, and what that does to everything you were going to do afterwards.
Who runs them
Patrol divisions, dispatch centres, corrections, and a great deal of industry outside policing. The pattern matters less than whether it lines up with the week the rest of your household runs on.
Where it turns up
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 — or hold it up for the officer next to you.
