Continental vs DuPont vs Pitman Shift Patterns: Which One Fits Your Team?

Continental uses three 8-hour shifts a day, usually a morning (06:00 to 14:00), an afternoon (14:00 to 22:00) and a night (22:00 to 06:00), shared between four teams. The common version is written 2-2-3: two mornings, two afternoons, three nights, then two days off. The blocks then shuffle (2-3-2, then 3-2-2 with three days off) so that over a 28-day cycle each team works 21 shifts in three runs of seven. Rotation is forwards, from mornings to afternoons to nights, which is the direction most people adapt to best. The price is the seven-shift run and the fact that "two days off" after a night block is really one full day once you have slept off the last night.

DuPont uses 12-hour shifts, four teams and a 28-day cycle. One team's sequence runs four nights, three off, three days, one off, three nights, three off, four days, then seven days off. The seven-day break at the end of every cycle is why people ask for it by name. The cost is the second week, which contains three days and three nights and comes to 72 hours.

Pitman also uses 12-hour shifts and four teams, but the cycle is only 14 days: two on, two off, three on, two off, two on, three off. Two teams cover days and two cover nights, and the two teams on the same shift are exact mirrors of each other, so every date has exactly one team on each. Everyone gets every other weekend off, which is a firmer promise than either of the other two can make. Some sites keep the teams fixed on days or nights; others swap the pairs every fortnight, which makes it a 28-day cycle usually called Pitman with rotation.

The 42-hour average is not a coincidence. Covering 24 hours a day for a week is 168 hours of work, and four teams sharing it get 42 hours each. That is above a standard 37.5-hour contract, and in the heaviest weeks it is above the 48-hour weekly limit, so all three patterns depend on the 17-week averaging in the Working Time Regulations or on a signed opt-out. The same arithmetic applies to 4-on-4-off, which is the fourth pattern people usually put on the shortlist.

Below is the full 14-day cycle for four teams, starting on a Monday. Teams A and B are the day pair and C and D the night pair. D is a 12-hour day shift, N a 12-hour night shift. Read any column down and you will find exactly one D and one N. Read any row across and you will see the two-two-three rhythm and the alternating weekend.

Team A works five shifts in the first week (60 hours) and two in the second (24 hours). Team B is the reverse. Nobody works more than three shifts in a row, and the three-shift run always lands on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which is the part staff notice: the weekend you work, you work all of it, and the next weekend you are guaranteed off. In our experience this is the single most-quoted reason a team picks Pitman over 4-on-4-off, where the weekends drift.

DuPont is easier to understand one team at a time, because the other three teams are the same sequence shifted by a week. Here is one team's 28 days, starting the cycle on a Monday.

Fourteen shifts in 28 days, 168 hours, 42 a week on average. Week 2 is the one to look at hard. Three days finish on Wednesday evening, one day off, then three nights start on Friday evening. That is a 48-hour turnaround from days to nights, which is the minimum we would accept, and it sits inside a 72-hour week. Teams that adopt DuPont for the seven-day break sometimes underestimate how the second week feels in February, when nothing much is happening in the seven days off to make up for it.

Continental suits sites where 8-hour shifts are non-negotiable: heavy physical work, an older workforce, an existing agreement that fixes shift length, or a long commute where 12 hours plus travel would push people past 14 hours away from home. It also gives the most shifts per person, which is useful when handovers carry a lot of information and you want people on site often. It is the worst of the three for weekends.

DuPont suits teams that would rather work hard and then disappear: control rooms, process plants, security contracts where the workforce lives some distance away. The seven days off is genuinely a week, and staff use it for travel that a 4-day break cannot hold. Be honest with yourselves about second jobs. A 72-hour week followed by a week that the rota shows as empty is a combination that can push a person well over the average if they are working elsewhere in the gap.

Pitman suits teams that need to promise weekends. Care homes, hospital wards, retail distribution and anywhere staff have school-age children tend to land here. It is also the easiest of the three to explain to a new starter, because the whole thing fits on one 14-day card. The five-shift week is heavy, but nobody works more than three in a row and the pattern never drifts against the calendar.

All three clear the 11-hour daily rest rule on paper, because a shift never follows another shift of a different type inside the same 24 hours. Fatigue is a different matter and is driven mostly by three things: the longest run, the direction of rotation, and what happens in the gap between a night block and the next day shift.

Continental's seven-shift runs are the biggest fatigue driver of any of the three. The forward rotation helps, but a person who starts three nights on the fifth day of a run has already worked four shifts, and the two days off that follow start at 06:00 with a sleep debt. DuPont's problem is concentration: 72 hours in a week, with a day-to-night turn in the middle of it. Pitman spreads the load most evenly, but the run of three 12-hour nights on a weekend, followed by the switch back to days two weeks later, still needs the rest gap checked whenever the day and night pairs rotate. Our guide on night shift fatigue planning goes into recovery days and rotation direction in detail.

One practical measure we have found useful is to count how many times per cycle a person finishes a night at 06:00 or 07:00 and has fewer than 48 hours before their next start. Continental has three such points per cycle, DuPont one, Pitman none in its fixed form. That number predicts sickness absence better than the average weekly hours do.

1. Settle shift length first. If 12 hours is off the table, you are choosing Continental or a fixed pattern, and the rest of this comparison does not apply.
2. Ask staff which they would rather have: a guaranteed weekend off every fortnight, or a full week off every month. That single question separates Pitman from DuPont more reliably than any spreadsheet.
3. Check the heaviest week against your contracts. A 72-hour DuPont week is lawful under averaging but may not be tolerable under a local agreement or for staff who have not opted out.
4. Balance the four teams on skill before you balance them on headcount. Every one of these patterns has one team alone on site at night.
5. Trial it for 12 weeks and measure sickness, overtime and swap requests. A pattern that generates a swap request a day is telling you something the averages do not.

If you are still deciding whether a continuous pattern is right at all, rota pattern examples covers the fixed and staggered alternatives, and the shift coverage checklist is the test we run on any pattern before it goes live.

Whichever pattern you pick, build it once as a repeating template per team and roll it forward, rather than typing each week by hand. A 14-day Pitman template is four rows; a 28-day DuPont template is one row copied with a one-week offset for each team. Then run the column test from the Pitman table on every date: one day team and one night team, no more and no fewer. Any tool that can flag a date where the count is wrong will catch most of the errors that creep in when someone edits one team's row in isolation.

Print the full cycle, hand it to the team, and ask them to find the weekend, the school run and the bank holiday that will cause trouble. They will find it before any check does.