On-call schedule calculator
How much on-call does each person carry? Enter the size of the rotation, the hours it covers and the shift length to see each person’s hours a week, shifts a year and how often their turn comes round. Every figure is an average over a full rotation.
33.6 hours a week per person
With 5 people covering 24/7 (168 hours a week) with one person on call, in 7-day shifts: each person is on call one shift in 5, about 33.6 hours a week on average, 10.4 weeks' worth a year across 10.4 shifts.
Run the rotation, not a spreadsheet
Uptimely runs on-call schedules for you: it rotates the pager, escalates to the next person when a page is not acknowledged, and alerts by SMS, phone call, Slack, Discord or push.
From a script or an agent
curl "https://getuptimely.com/api/tools/on-call?people=6&coverage=24x7&shiftDays=7&tiers=2" returns the same figures as JSON, or as Markdown with Accept: text/markdown. No API key. API documentation.
How many people do you need for a 24/7 on-call rotation?
Five or more for one person on call at a time is a common rule of thumb: with weekly shifts each person is then on call one week in five, about 34 hours of pager time a week on average. With fewer than three people each person carries the pager a third of the time or more, which is hard to sustain.
What is a secondary on-call?
A second person who is paged if the primary does not acknowledge an alert in time. It makes missed pages much rarer, but it doubles the on-call load per person, so it needs a larger rotation.
Should on-call shifts be a day or a week long?
Weekly shifts mean fewer handovers and are the most common choice. Daily or shorter shifts spread the interrupted nights more evenly but need a clear handover each time. Round-the-clock shifts longer than a week are a common cause of on-call fatigue.
Does this calculator account for time zones?
No. It shares one coverage window evenly across the rotation. A follow-the-sun rotation, where each region covers its own daytime, is several smaller rotations; work each one out separately with its own coverage hours.