How to Prepare a Shift Schedule: Step by Step (With Examples)

A shift schedule is the weekly plan showing who works on which day and at what hours. A good schedule balances workload, staff availability and the legal working limits together. To build one, you first size the demand and place people against it; then you check for conflicts, overtime and rest periods before sharing the plan with the team.

This content is for general information only and is not binding legal advice. Consult a professional for your specific situation.

Steps to build a shift schedule

1. Size the demand. Decide how many people you need on which days and hours; separate the busy and quiet periods.
2. Collect availability. Gather staff leave, preferred hours and constraints (school, second job, health) in advance.
3. Place people. Match demand to availability; balance experienced and new staff on the same shift.
4. Check. Is anyone double-booked? Do weekly hours exceed 45? Is the rest between two shifts enough? Review all of it.
5. Share and update. Publish the schedule in a single place everyone can see, and announce changes instantly.

Example: a weekly shift table

For a small team a simple table is usually enough to make the plan clear:

The last column flags the portion above 45 weekly hours as overtime.

Legal limits in a schedule

The core limits to keep in mind when building shifts are:

• 45 hours a week: work beyond this counts as overtime and is paid at a premium. Overtime cannot exceed 270 hours a year.
• 11 hours between shifts: there must be at least 11 uninterrupted hours of rest between two working periods.
• 24 hours of weekly rest: the employee must be given at least 24 uninterrupted hours of weekly rest within each seven-day period.

Common mistakes

• Missing conflicts. Double-booking one person is easy to overlook on a hand-kept schedule.
• Ignoring breaks. If unpaid breaks are not deducted, the weekly total looks inflated.
• Not announcing last-minute changes. A change sent over WhatsApp does not mean everyone sees the current plan.

From Excel to digital planning

Excel is fine to start with, but as the team grows, conflicts, leave and changes get hard to manage in one table. At that point a tool that builds the plan in one place and pushes it to the team's phones makes the work easier. ROTA plans shifts by drag-and-drop, warns about conflicts, and calculates real hours — down to overtime — from clock-in/clock-out.