48/96 Shift Calculator

A 48/96 is a three-platoon fire rotation built out of two back-to-back 24-hour shifts followed by four days off in a row. You work 48 straight hours, then you are off for 96, and the cycle repeats. Like the 24/48, it uses three platoons, usually called A, B, and C shift, and exactly one platoon is on duty in the station every day of the year.

The cycle is six calendar days long: two on, four off. Each firefighter works one of those six-day cycles per rotation, so your on-duty block marches forward through the week over time. The calculator above phases the pattern to a real on-duty date you enter, so the two-day blocks it projects line up with your actual platoon rather than a generic template.

This surprises people: even though a 48/96 feels different from a 24/48, the average weekly hours are identical. Over a six-day cycle you work 48 hours, and 48 divided by 6 days times 7 days is 56 hours a week. Annualized, a straight 48/96 with no reductions comes to about 2,912 hours a year, the same ballpark as a 24/48. The schedule changes when you work, not how much.

What a 48/96 does change is the shape of your month. You work about 61 two-day blocks a year instead of a larger number of single 24s, which means roughly five commutes a month instead of ten, and a full four-day recovery window after every tour. For a firefighter with a long drive to the station, cutting the trips in half is the whole appeal.

Fire departments do not measure overtime on a 40-hour week. Under FLSA Section 7(k), the public-safety exemption, an employer declares a work period of up to 28 days, and for fire protection employees a 28-day period caps straight time at 212 hours. Shorter periods scale down: a 24-day period caps at 182 hours, a 14-day period at 106, and a 7-day period at 53.

Because a 48/96 runs the same average hours as a 24/48, it runs the same roughly 224 hours in a 28-day period, which is about 12 hours over the 212-hour cap. That is roughly 12 hours of overtime built into every 28-day period, the exact same pay math as a 24/48, before anyone ever picks up an extra shift. A common mistake is to compute overtime as 56 minus 40, or 16 hours a week; that 40-hour framing does not apply to a 7(k) fire department at all, and it overstates the built-in overtime by a wide margin. The tool above shows the scheduled 7(k) position for the work period you select. If you want to dig into the thresholds, the FLSA 7(k) overtime calculator breaks down every work-period length.

The four days off are the reward, but they come after 48 straight hours on duty, and that block is where the debate lives. Supporters point to the long recovery window, fewer drives to the station, and a rhythm that protects large chunks of family time. Critics point to the back half of hour 40-plus on a busy engine, where sleep debt from a hard first night carries straight into a second full shift with no reset in between.

How a 48/96 actually feels depends heavily on call volume. A slower suburban or rural company where crews reliably sleep through much of the night handles the second 24 very differently than a high-volume urban house that runs calls around the clock. Many departments that adopt a 48/96 pair it with rules on how held-over and mandatory overtime stack onto the back of a 48, precisely because a third consecutive 24 is a real fatigue and safety line. Model your real block above before you argue for or against the schedule.

The 48/96 spread widely across career fire departments over the last two decades, especially in the western United States, and it is now one of the most common alternatives to the traditional 24/48. It tends to win support where firefighters commute long distances, where crews want longer uninterrupted time off, and where call volume is moderate enough that two consecutive 24s are sustainable.

Because a 48/96 keeps the same three-platoon structure and the same average hours as a 24/48, a department can often switch between the two without changing headcount or total payroll hours, which is part of why the 48/96 shows up so often on the bargaining table. If your department is weighing the move, project both rotations from the same on-duty date and compare the actual days side by side.