Fire Department Shift Schedule Template

Download the free template

Two formats, no sign-up wall. The Excel workbook is fully editable with separate tabs for your roster and each schedule type. The PDF is built to print clean on a single landscape page per schedule so you can post it at the station.

Includes four sheets: Roster, 24/48 Kelly-style rotation, Duty-Crew Nights, and Weekend Rotation. Edit names, dates, and coverage hours to fit your department.

Pick the schedule that fits how your crew staffs

Most volunteer and combination departments don't run one schedule — they run a mix. A career platoon might hold a 24/48 rotation while volunteers fill duty-crew nights and weekends around their day jobs. This template covers the three patterns that show up most often, so you can copy the one that matches your station and start filling in names.

24/48 (Kelly-style) rotation

The 24/48 is the backbone schedule for departments that staff around the clock. You split your firefighters into three platoons — call them A, B, and C. Each platoon works a single 24-hour shift, then gets 48 hours off before its next on-duty day. Over three days every crew has worked once, and the cycle repeats indefinitely.

Here's how the first week falls out when crew A starts the cycle on a Monday:

Day	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
On duty	A	B	C	A	B	C	A

People often call this a "Kelly schedule," after the rotation that gives each crew an extra day off every cycle to balance hours over the long run. The template lays out four weeks of the A-B-C pattern; set your cycle start date so the first on-duty day lines up with your calendar, and the rest fills in.

Duty-crew nights

For a lot of volunteer departments, the hard part isn't the day — it's getting bodies in the station overnight. Duty-crew scheduling flips the model: instead of assigning shifts top-down, you publish the nights that need coverage and let firefighters sign up for the ones that work around their jobs and families.

Set your coverage window (1800 to 0600 is common), decide how many people you need on each night, and let the roster fill across a four-week block. Tracking it on paper works until two people claim the same night, or someone backs out and the grid goes stale. That's the moment most departments start looking for something better.

Weekend rotation

Weekends are their own problem — higher call volume, fewer people available, and a fairness question about who keeps getting stuck with Saturday nights. A weekend rotation spreads Saturday and Sunday day and night coverage across your crews so the load moves around the month instead of landing on the same volunteers every time.

The weekend tab rotates crews through four weekends of Sat-day, Sat-night, Sun-day, and Sun-night slots. When someone trades a weekend, note who owes the payback shift on the roster so it doesn't get lost.

Spreadsheet vs. a scheduling tool

A free template is the right tool when your schedule is simple and stable. It stops being the right tool when keeping it accurate eats your evenings. Here's where the line usually is:

What you're managing	Spreadsheet / printable	ShiftSynch
Posting the base rotation	Works well	Works well
Shift swaps between firefighters	Manual edits, easy to miss	Staff request a swap, manager approves or denies
Time-off & vacation requests	Email or text, tracked by hand	Requests submitted in-app with manager approval
Filling open shifts	Phone-tree the roster	Post the open shift; eligible staff claim it
Right qualification on every shift	You remember, or you don't	Eligibility checks the required qualification at claim time
Coverage at a glance	Eyeball the grid	Scheduled-vs-required coverage % with CSV export
Notifying people of changes	Group text	In-app, email, and mobile push notifications

None of this means you should abandon the template today. Run it as long as it serves you. But if you recognize the pattern — a schedule that's technically in a spreadsheet but actually lives in your head and your text messages — that's the signal to move it somewhere built for it.