Fourteen-day cycle, seven 12-hour shifts, and an overtime total that depends on where your workweek starts. Model the workweek boundary that decides where your overtime actually lands.
Every field updates your pay instantly.
Patterns are generated automatically — click any calendar day to override it.
Standard FLSA: overtime applies after 40h in any Sun–Sat workweek within this period.
Gross Pay — This Period
$0.00
The Pitman rotation runs on a fourteen-day cycle — two on, two off, three on, two off, two on, three off. That works out to seven twelve-hour shifts per fortnight, 84 scheduled hours, and an average of 42 hours a week. The 42-hour average is the number almost everyone quotes, and it is also the number that creates the most payroll arguments, because the Fair Labor Standards Act does not pay averages. It pays workweeks, one at a time, and it never lets a light week cancel out a heavy one.
Because seven shifts cannot divide evenly across two workweeks, a Pitman fortnight splits unevenly, and how it splits depends on the day your employer's workweek starts. In five of the seven possible alignments you get a four-shift week and a three-shift week. In the other two you get a five-shift week and a two-shift week. All of the overtime comes from the heavy week. The light week produces none, and it does not offset the heavy one.
Here is where the arithmetic surprises people. Four twelve-hour shifts is 48 scheduled hours, which looks like eight hours of overtime. If your employer deducts a thirty-minute unpaid meal break per shift — common on plant, hospital and dispatch rosters — each shift is paid as 11.5 hours, so four shifts is 46 paid hours and the overtime is six hours, not eight. The three-shift week falls to 34.5 hours, well under the threshold. In the five-and-two alignment the heavy week is 60 scheduled hours (20 hours of overtime), or 57.5 paid hours (17.5 hours of overtime) with the break.
Each unpaid break removes hours from the top of the heavy week, where they are worth time-and-a-half. In the four-and-three alignment, two overtime hours at $48 (a $32 base wage at 1.5 times) are $96 a fortnight; across 26 cycles that is about $2,500. That is why the break field on this calculator is not a rounding detail.
Pitman is usually run with two paired crews, one on days and one on nights, working the identical calendar pattern. On paper their pay should be identical apart from the night differential. In practice it can differ, and the reason is the workweek boundary.
An employer sets a fixed, regularly recurring workweek of 168 hours — most pick Sunday 00:00 to Saturday 23:59. Hours count toward the workweek in which they are actually worked. A day crew working 07:00 to 19:00 never crosses that boundary. A night crew working 19:00 to 07:00 crosses it whenever a shift starts on the last day of the workweek: five of the twelve hours fall on that day and the other seven fall on the next day, and therefore in the next workweek.
That moves overtime between weeks, and over a fortnight the total can differ from the day crew's by several hours in either direction. Two employees on the same roster and wage but with different shift windows can see different paychecks. This calculator credits each whole shift to the day it starts, so it does not split a night shift across the workweek boundary. If your night crew's shifts start on the last day of the workweek, expect your real paycheck to differ from the estimate here.
Pitman crews are normally lettered A through D, each starting the cycle offset from the others. Your cycle start date is what determines which slot you are in, so set it to the first day of an on-block you can actually confirm from a past roster rather than to the start of a calendar month. Everything downstream — which week carries the overtime, which weekends you work, how the holiday falls — follows from that single date.
An employer chooses its workweek and may change it only if the change is meant to be permanent and is not designed to avoid overtime (29 CFR 778.105). If your Pitman overtime dropped after a schedule change, check the workweek start day on your pay stub and ask payroll whether it changed.
Night and weekend differentials on a Pitman roster count toward your regular rate, so they raise your overtime rate too (29 CFR 778.207). The calculator builds the regular rate one workweek at a time.
Want the full cycle table? See the Pitman 2-2-3 guide, which lists all seven workweek alignments.
