Fourteen-day cycle, seven 12-hour shifts, a fixed three-and-four week split. Model the workweek boundary that decides where your overtime actually lands.
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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 weeks, every Pitman fortnight splits into a three-shift week and a four-shift week. That split is structurally fixed: no matter which day of the cycle your employer anchors the workweek to, you always land on three-and-four. The four-shift week is where every overtime hour in the cycle comes from. The three-shift week produces exactly zero, and it contributes nothing toward the next week's threshold.
Here is where the arithmetic surprises people. Four twelve-hour shifts is 48 scheduled hours, which looks like eight hours of overtime. But if your employer deducts a thirty-minute unpaid meal break per shift — standard across most plant, hospital and dispatch Pitman rosters — each shift is paid as 11.5 hours. Four shifts is 46 paid hours, and the overtime is six hours, not eight. The three-shift week falls to 34.5 hours, still well clear of the threshold.
That two-hour difference is not a straight-time loss. Those hours were sitting above the 40-hour line, so they were worth time-and-a-half. On a $32 base wage, a thirty-minute unpaid break costs roughly $96 a fortnight in overtime value versus $64 if the same hours had been ordinary time. Across a year of Pitman cycles that is close to $2,500 in difference, which 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 often is not, and the reason is the workweek boundary.
An employer must establish a fixed, regularly recurring period of 168 hours as its workweek — most pick Sunday 00:00 to Saturday 23:59. Hours are credited to the workweek in which they are actually worked, not the workweek the shift started in. A day crew working 07:00 to 19:00 never crosses that boundary. A night crew working 19:00 to 07:00 crosses it every single time a shift starts on a Saturday: five of those twelve hours fall into the following Sunday, and therefore into the next workweek.
When a Saturday night shift lands inside a four-shift week, those five hours get pushed forward into what would otherwise have been the light week, and the overtime total for the fortnight can shift by several hours in either direction. Two employees, same roster, same wage, different shift window, different cheque. This calculator's per-day shift coding is what lets you model that, rather than assuming both crews land in the same place.
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.
One thing worth knowing: an employer may choose its workweek anchor day freely, but it cannot change that anchor to reduce overtime liability. The anchor must be fixed and recurring. If your Pitman overtime dropped after a schedule change was announced, the anchor day is the first thing to check on your pay stub, because a workweek that moves is a workweek that is doing something it should not.
Night and weekend differentials on a Pitman roster stack on top of everything above. A premium applies to every hour worked inside its window, including hours that are simultaneously overtime hours — the differential and the overtime multiplier are separate entitlements, not alternatives, and the calculator treats them that way.
