Twenty-eight-day cycle with a full week off at the end. See the five-shift week that produces 17.5 overtime hours from a roster advertised at 42.
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 DuPont rotation is a twenty-eight-day cycle built from twelve-hour shifts: four nights, three off, three days, one off, three nights, three off, four days, then seven consecutive days off. That is 168 scheduled hours over four weeks — an average of 42 hours a week, the same headline figure as Pitman, arrived at by a completely different route and producing a completely different overtime bill.
The seven-day break at the end of the cycle is the pattern's selling point and its payroll trap. One workweek in every four contains almost no scheduled hours at all. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act that week is simply a low week. It generates no overtime, it banks no credit, and it cannot be used to offset the heavy weeks that came before it. If you take the 42-hour average and reason that it should yield two overtime hours a week, or eight per cycle, you will underestimate your real entitlement by a wide margin.
The sharpest feature of DuPont is the single day off wedged between the three-day block and the three-night block. Read the cycle as a run and you get three days on, one day off, three nights on — seven twelve-hour shifts inside an eight-day span, with one twenty-four-hour turnaround in the middle of it.
Depending on where your employer's workweek boundary falls across that run, a single workweek can contain five shifts. Five twelve-hour shifts is 60 scheduled hours, or 57.5 paid hours after a thirty-minute unpaid break — 17.5 overtime hours in one week, from a roster whose advertised average is 42. That single week can carry more overtime than a Pitman worker accrues in a month, and it is invisible to anyone reasoning from the cycle average.
This is why the cycle start date matters more on DuPont than on any other twelve-hour pattern. Shift the anchor by two days and the overtime total for the same 28-day period can move by ten hours or more. Set your start date to a confirmed first-night-of-a-four-block from a real past roster, then step through several cycles using the period arrows to see how the totals move.
DuPont's cycle length is exactly twenty-eight days, which happens to be the maximum work period permitted under the FLSA's section 7(k) partial exemption. That coincidence causes real confusion, and occasionally real underpayment.
Section 7(k) is not a schedule type. It is an exemption available only to public agencies employing bona fide fire protection or law enforcement personnel, and it lets those employers use work periods of seven to twenty-eight days with raised thresholds instead of the 40-hour week. DuPont is overwhelmingly a private-sector chemical, refining, power generation and manufacturing pattern. A plant operator on DuPont is a standard 40-hour-workweek employee no matter how neatly the cycle length lines up. If your employer is applying a 212-hour threshold to a DuPont roster in a private facility, that is worth raising, and the standard setting on this calculator is the one that models your entitlement correctly.
DuPont is run with four crews, each entering the cycle at a different offset so the plant stays covered around the clock. Because the overtime lands unevenly across the cycle, the four crews do not receive identical pay in any given pay period — they receive identical pay only when measured across a full rotation. Over a bi-weekly cycle the variance between crews can run into several hundred dollars.
The practical consequence is budgeting. Annualise from the twenty-eight-day cycle, not from a single fortnight, or you will anchor your household numbers to whichever half of the rotation you happened to look at. The annualised figure in the metrics row does this projection for you.
One more detail specific to this pattern: DuPont front-loads nights. The cycle contains four night shifts and three night shifts in separate blocks against three day shifts and four day shifts, so night differential carries roughly half your worked hours. A one or two point difference in your night differential percentage moves your annual total further on DuPont than on any other schedule in this tool.
