Firefighter Shift Schedule Maker

The only setting on this site where one shift is a whole calendar day — and the one where the rest rule, not the roster size, decides everything.

Fire service scheduling is the odd one out, and the reason is arithmetic. A 24-hour tour plus a 24-hour rest requirement means a firefighter cannot come back the next day, or the day after — the earliest they can start another tour is 48 hours after the last one began. Every other decision follows from that single fact: it is why departments run three or four platoons, why a station needing four on duty needs at least twelve people before you have even thought about rank, and why the roster is far more rigid than the headcount suggests.

The sample loaded here is a 21-day station on 24-hour tours: four on duty at all times, one of whom must be a company officer and one a paramedic, drawn from twenty-five people. The shift is written 08:00 to 08:00, and that is not a typo or a special setting — an end time that is not later than the start means the shift wraps, so 08:00 to 08:00 is a full 1,440 minutes. Rest, consecutive days and total hours all then work on that block with no special-casing at all.

Read the continuity numbers differently on this page. Everywhere else on this site, a roster made entirely of single-day blocks is a warning sign — it means someone is being called in on scattered days. Here it is simply what a 24/48 rotation looks like, because the rest rule makes consecutive days impossible by construction. The results page detects that and stops flagging it. What you should watch instead is the tightest-turnaround figure and the per-person tour counts, which is where an unfair roster actually shows up in the fire service.

If your department runs 48/96 rather than 24/48, raise MaxConsecutiveDays to 2 and drop MinRestHours to something under 24 so a second consecutive tour becomes legal — the model will not produce the 48 unless the rest rule permits it. Kelly schedules and other named rotations are a different kind of tool: if you want a published repeating pattern rather than an optimized assignment, the rotation generator lays those out directly.

Data

Download this sample (.xlsx)

Or drop your own workbook here — choose a file

Same sheet layout as the samples: shifts, demand all, supply all, skills, one grid per demand and per person, parameters. Download a sample first if you want the template.

Fire service scheduling questions

How do I enter a 24-hour shift? Set the start and end to the same time — 08:00 to 08:00. An end time that is not later than the start means the shift crosses midnight, so identical times are read as a full 24 hours rather than as zero.

Why can't anyone work two days in a row? Because MinRestHours is 24 in the loaded sample. A tour that ends at 08:00 cannot be followed by one starting at 08:00 the same morning, so the next possible tour is the following day. That is the intended behaviour for 24/48; lower the rest hours if your department runs 48/96.

Can it hold a minimum company staffing level? Yes — that is what the demand grid is. Four on an engine is a demand of four; if your department staffs differently by station or by day of week, every cell in that grid is independently editable.

How do I require an officer and a medic on every tour? Make each a separate demand with the concurrent flag set and give only the qualified people a skill row for it. Concurrent matters here: your company officer is one of the four on duty, not a fifth body, and the flag is what says so.

⚠ Why did every firefighter come out capped at the same number of hours? Check max_hrs_roster (called max_hrs_week in workbooks downloaded before 2026-08-17 — same field, still accepted). It applies across the whole roster, so on a 21-day horizon you need roughly three times a weekly figure. Entering a fire-service 72-hour week caps each person at 72 hours for the entire three weeks, which looks exactly like a short-staffed station and is not one. The giveaway is that every person lands on the identical hours total — that is a contract cap, not a coverage failure.

Does it know about FLSA 7(k) overtime? No. It schedules hours; it does not compute pay periods, the 7(k) work-period exemption, or overtime liability. Use the exported hours as the input to whatever does.

The same solver, other settings

Each of these loads a different worked example and is written for that setting, but they all run the same cross-day engine — if none of them matches yours, start from whichever is closest and replace the data.

correctional officer rosters — post-based staffing and the relief factor behind mandatory overtime
police patrol schedules — watches, minimum beats, and every-other-weekend-off
security guard posts — a small team covering one post, with weekend fairness switched on
the general 24/7 shift schedule maker — any round-the-clock operation; start here if none of the others fit

How this differs from the other two modes

The staff scheduling optimizer on the home page works in half-hour slots inside a single day: you say how many people you need at 08:00, at 08:30, at 09:00, and it invents shift blocks to match. That is the right model when demand rises and falls through the day — a call centre, a restaurant, a shop — and the wrong model here, because every one of its rules is scoped to one day column. A 19:00–07:00 night becomes two disconnected half-shifts, and no rest rule can span the midnight boundary.

This page replaces the time axis with a shift axis. Your shifts are named blocks with real clock times, and an end time earlier than the start time simply means the shift crosses midnight. Rest between two shifts then becomes arithmetic on absolute minutes across the whole horizon rather than a special case, which is what makes cross-day rules — minimum rest, maximum consecutive days, maximum consecutive nights, no day shift after a night — expressible at all.

The third mode, the shift rotation generator, does not optimize anything: it lays out a named pattern — DuPont, Panama, Pitman, 4-on-4-off — across four crews. Use it when you want a known, published rotation and you do not need the schedule to respond to who is qualified for what, who is on holiday, or which shifts need three people instead of two.

What the solver actually decides

Coverage, skills, availability, pinned assignments and contracted hours are hard — the model physically cannot assign someone to work they are not qualified for or not available for. Coverage shortfall, minimum-hours shortfall, weekend fairness and cross-person equity are soft: each carries a penalty rather than a prohibition. That is a deliberate choice. A roster tool that answers “infeasible” tells you nothing useful; this one always returns a roster and then names the compromises it had to make, in the warnings and the unfilled-posts table.

Why the continuity numbers are on the results page

A roster can be 100% covered and still be unliveable. Everyone in a pay grade earns the same rate and coverage pins the total hours, so rearranging who works when often costs the model literally nothing — the same ward solved twice with staff listed in a different order produced 21 different shifts at an identical objective. Left alone, the solver returns whichever scattered roster it reached first. So the model carries a small penalty on each new block of consecutive days worked, and another on flipping between days and nights, and the results page reports what came out: how many blocks, how long they are, how many are lone single days, and the tightest turnaround anyone actually got. Those are the numbers to argue with, not the objective value.

Common questions

Is it free? Yes — no account, no trial. Your workbook is read to solve the model and not stored.

How many people and days can it handle? Up to 40 people and 31 days per solve. The 28-day hospital ward sample builds roughly 4,300 variables and solves in well under a minute.

What if I want a shift to be someone specific? Put f in that person's grid cell. Forced cells are hard — the solver schedules around them.

Is minimum rest really 11 hours? Only by default. 11 hours is the EU Working Time Directive figure; the US has no federal equivalent and state rules vary, so it is a parameter (MinRestHours) rather than a constant. Set it to whatever your jurisdiction or contract says.