Quick answer
Most US fire departments run one of three rotations: 24/48 (one 24-hour shift, two days off), 48/96 (two 24-hour shifts, four days off), or a Kelly schedule (24-hour shifts every other day with a recurring Kelly day off). All repeat on cycles a normal calendar app cannot express with a weekly rule. The fix: describe the rotation once, generate the shifts, and subscribe to the result as a calendar link.
Fire departments run rotations built from 24-hour shifts, organized into A, B, and C platoons. The patterns repeat on 3-day, 6-day, or longer cycles, never weekly, which is why the colored paper shift calendar is still a firehouse institution. This guide covers the common rotations and the modern replacement: a subscribable calendar that knows your platoon's whole year.
The common rotations
| Schedule | Pattern | Cycle | Avg hours/week | |---|---|---|---| | 24/48 | 1 day on, 2 off | 3 days | 56 | | 48/96 | 2 days on, 4 off | 6 days | 56 | | Kelly variants | 24-hour shifts every other day, plus a recurring Kelly day off | Varies by department | Set by the Kelly cadence |
24/48 is the classic 3-platoon schedule: one 24-hour shift, two days off, forever. Simple, but no off-block is longer than 2 days without leave.
48/96 packs the same hours into two back-to-back 24s followed by 4 full days off. Departments across the western US have moved to it; firefighters tend to like the 4-day blocks and the halved commuting.
Kelly schedules layer a recurring extra day off (the Kelly day) onto an every-other-day pattern to bring average hours down to contract targets. The exact cycle length differs by department, so confirm yours against the posted platoon calendar rather than a generic template.
Why these never fit a calendar app
Every consumer calendar app repeats things weekly or monthly. A 48/96 repeats every 6 days, so the same shift lands on Monday one cycle and Thursday the next. There is no repeat rule for that, and a 24-hour shift also has to end the next day, which hand-typed entries regularly get wrong.
The workable approach: describe the rotation once, in plain words, anchored to your platoon's next duty day, and have the shift calendar maker generate a year of shifts as real events. The ready-made 48/96 schedule template is the same thing with the description pre-written. Check the preview against the platoon calendar, publish, and subscribe on the phone.
The family is the real subscriber
Firefighter households organize life around the platoon calendar: holidays that land on duty days, school events, every fourth Christmas. That is why the fridge calendar exists.
A published calendar link does the same job on everyone's phone. A spouse subscribes once. Parents who watch the kids subscribe once. When a trade or schedule change gets edited into the calendar, every subscribed phone updates on its next refresh, no group text required.
One honest caveat: subscribed calendars refresh on the phone's schedule, roughly hourly on Apple and up to a day on Google. For tonight's trade, still send the text. For the other 99% of the year, the link carries it.
Setting up a 48/96 in one paste
The 48/96 preset description looks like this: 24-hour shifts starting at 8:00am, work 2 consecutive days, then 4 days off, repeating, first shift on your platoon's next duty date, build 12 months. Edit the start time to match your department's shift change and the preview shows every duty day for the year ahead, each one ending 8:00am the following morning.