TOOL — ROTA HOURS
Work out what a repeating rota really averages: hours a week, hours a year, and the gross pay behind it. Pick a common pattern or put in your own cycle.
This averages the rota at one rate. Overtime, night and weekend premiums are separate, and no tax or National Insurance is deducted here — see the take-home calculator on the home page for that.
A rota repeats over a fixed number of days. Calendar months are 28 to 31 days. The two do not divide evenly, so the number of shifts in a month changes even when your pattern never does. That is why your pay can move by a hundred pounds or more from month to month on an identical rota — and why checking a month against “the usual” is unreliable unless you count the actual shifts.
The law caps the average working week at 48 hours unless you have signed an opt-out, and it requires rest breaks. Both are set out by GOV.UK and ACAS. A 4-on-4-off pattern at 12 hours sits at 42 hours a week on average, so it usually fits inside that limit — but the average is measured over a reference period, not week by week, so a heavy week on its own is not automatically a breach.
Shift Tracker UK can hold your rest-day pattern and your logged shifts together, so the hours and the pay are worked out from the same source. Free, no install, any phone or PC.
It depends on the shift length. Four 12-hour shifts followed by four days off average 42 hours a week, because 48 hours are worked in every 8-day cycle. Four 10-hour shifts average 35 hours a week.
Because calendar months are 28 to 31 days long while the rota cycle is a fixed number of days. A repeating cycle does not divide evenly into months, so some months contain more shifts than others.
No. This calculator averages the rota at one rate. Overtime, night, weekend and bank holiday premiums are separate, and the app's take-home calculator applies PAYE and National Insurance.