Twenty-four-hour tours for fire and EMS. Switch between the standard 40-hour rule and the 7(k) exemption, and account for excluded sleep time.
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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
A 24/48 roster is a three-day cycle — one twenty-four-hour tour on duty, then forty-eight hours off. It is the standard rotation across most municipal fire departments and a large share of third-service EMS agencies, and it produces the highest scheduled hours of any pattern in this calculator: roughly 240 hours in a twenty-eight-day period, an average of about 56 hours a week.
Run that through the ordinary Fair Labor Standards Act rule and the result is dramatic. A 40-hour weekly threshold against a 56-hour average would generate somewhere near 224 overtime hours a year from the schedule alone. Almost no fire department pays that, and in most cases they are not required to, because of section 7(k).
Section 7(k) is a partial exemption available to public agencies employing bona fide fire protection or law enforcement personnel. Instead of a 40-hour workweek, the employer may declare a recurring work period of between seven and twenty-eight days, with a raised hours threshold before overtime is owed.
At the full twenty-eight-day period, the threshold is 212 hours for fire protection personnel and 171 hours for law enforcement personnel. Against roughly 240 scheduled hours, that leaves about 28 overtime hours per 28-day period for a firefighter on 24/48 — real overtime, built into the schedule, but a fraction of what the standard rule would produce. For shorter work periods the thresholds prorate; a seven-day 7(k) period sits at 53 hours for fire and 43 hours for law enforcement, which is why the department's declared period length is worth knowing precisely.
Two things are worth checking before assuming 7(k) applies to you. It is available only to public agencies, so a private ambulance service running 24-hour cars generally cannot use it. And the exemption attaches to the role, not the uniform — dispatchers, mechanics, and civilian staff in a fire department are typically not covered even when they work the same tours. The toggle in this calculator exists because eligibility is employer-specific and role-specific, and getting it wrong changes your modelled overtime by a factor of five or more.
The second rule unique to tours of twenty-four hours or longer is the sleep-time exclusion. Where an employer and employee have an express or implied agreement, a regularly scheduled sleeping period of up to eight hours may be excluded from hours worked, provided adequate sleeping facilities are furnished and the employee can usually get an uninterrupted night's sleep.
The condition that matters operationally is the interruption rule. If calls break up the sleeping period so badly that the employee does not get at least five hours of sleep, the entire sleeping period counts as hours worked — not just the portion spent on calls. On a busy engine or a high-volume medic unit, that distinction can swing a single tour by eight paid hours, and across a month it is the single largest variable in a 24/48 pay cheque.
Bona fide meal periods of up to an hour may also be excluded on a long tour. Enter your combined excluded time in the unpaid break field; on this pattern that field is not a thirty-minute formality, and setting it to zero when your department excludes sleep time will overstate your pay substantially.
Many departments layer a Kelly day onto 24/48 — a scheduled duty day removed at a fixed interval specifically to pull average hours down under the 7(k) threshold and suppress built-in overtime. If your department uses one, the pure three-day cycle generated here will overstate your hours until you code those days off on the calendar.
Click the Kelly days to Off, and code any mandatory holdover or forced tour as Forced OT so the premium hours are separated from your scheduled ones. Because a 24/48 tour spans both daylight and overnight hours, this calculator treats roughly half of each tour as night hours for differential purposes, which reflects how most department differential policies are written — but if yours pays a flat per-tour stipend instead of an hourly percentage, model it by adjusting the differential percentage until the tour total matches a real stub.
