14 on, 14 off schedule

How the 14 on, 14 off rotation works

You travel to site, work fourteen 12-hour shifts in a row, travel home, and have fourteen days off. The 28-day cycle repeats indefinitely, and two crews on opposite halves of it keep the site staffed: your back-to-back arrives as you leave. Offshore platforms, mine sites and remote camps run around the clock, so a second pair of crews covers nights, or each crew is split into a day shift and a night shift on the same rotation.

The block is usually longer than twelve hours on the ground. Offshore days commonly run 12 hours of work plus handovers, safety meetings and a helicopter or boat transfer at each end that may or may not be paid, so the fourteen days feel like more. On the other side, the fourteen days off are entirely yours: no shifts, no on-call, and often no phone signal on site to begin with.

The generator shows the whole 28 days from the date your hitch starts. Because the cycle is exactly four weeks, your travel days land on the same weekday every time, which makes the pattern easy to plan around even though you are away for half of every month.

Hours, overtime, and what it pays

Fourteen shifts of 12 hours is 168 hours per cycle, an average of 42 hours a week, but the distribution is the most extreme of any pattern here: with the workweek aligned to the hitch the four weeks are 84, 84, 0 and 0. Every hour above 40 in the two working weeks is overtime at a 40-hour threshold, which is why the table above shows such a large range.

How that is actually paid varies more than on any other schedule. Many offshore and mining roles are day-rate or salaried with a rotation allowance, and the overtime question turns on whether the job is exempt, whether the worker is a seaman (exempt from FLSA overtime), and which country's law applies to a vessel or platform. Hourly workers on the US outer continental shelf are generally covered by the FLSA and get time and a half over 40; Australian FIFO miners are covered by awards and enterprise agreements with rostered-hours arrangements.

If you are hourly and non-exempt, the arithmetic is simple and large: each aligned 84-hour week carries 44 overtime hours. Price a working week in the overtime pay calculator with your rate and any offshore or night differential to see what a hitch is worth.

Who uses it and why

Even-time rotations are standard on offshore oil and gas platforms and drilling rigs, in fly-in fly-out mining in Australia and Canada, on remote construction and pipeline projects, on tugs and offshore supply vessels, and increasingly for offshore wind technicians. The 14/14 is the most common even-time split; 21/21 and 28/28, and the unequal 2/1 and 3/1 rotations, serve the same purpose with longer or shorter hitches.

The appeal is total separation. Half the year is entirely off, which suits people who live far from the site, run a second business, or want long stretches with family. The cost is the other half: fourteen days away, twelve-plus hours a day, in a camp or on a platform, with fatigue accumulating toward the end of the hitch.

Pros and cons

Even-time, weighed honestly.

• —Pro: half of every month completely off, with no on-call.
• —Pro: travel days fall on the same weekday every cycle.
• —Pro: the highest concentration of overtime hours of any 42-hour pattern, if you are paid hourly.
• —Con: fourteen consecutive 12-hour days, with fatigue building through the second week.
• —Con: no weekends off during the hitch and no short breaks to reset.
• —Con: pay treatment depends on exemption status, day rates and maritime rules; read the contract.

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