Free shift schedule template

A weekly template in Excel and as a PDF, free and with no sign-up. Download it, use it and share it with anyone.

Why we give it away

We make Turnativo, an app to organize a team’s shifts. But not everyone needs an app: if your team is three people, or you just want to sort out a single week, a good template may be enough. This is the one we would have liked to find ourselves: simple, it adds up the hours for you and it prints well. It’s really free, with no sign-up and no fine print.

What it includes

• One row per worker (up to 12) and the seven days of the week.
• A shift legend with codes and hours: morning, afternoon, night, split, off and vacation. Swap them for your own.
• The Hours column, which adds up each person’s hours from the shifts you type, next to their contract hours.
• It works in Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets. The PDF is ready to print in A4 landscape.

Its limits (so you know what you’re getting)

It’s a spreadsheet, and it has the limits all spreadsheets have:

• It won’t warn you if someone doesn’t get enough rest between shifts or works too many days in a row. You have to check that yourself.
• It only adds up hours. Nights, Sundays and holidays you count by hand.
• It doesn’t reach anyone on its own. You send it by message or print it, and with every change you send it again and make sure everyone has the right one.
• One week at a time, with no repeating rotations and no history of what was worked.

If that’s enough for you, great: it’s yours. If it falls short, below is what Turnativo does.

How to make a shift schedule, step by step

1. Define your shifts. Morning, afternoon, night or split, with their hours and a short code (M, A, N, S).
2. List your team with their weekly contract hours.
3. Cover the hard part first: weekends, holidays and nights. Then spread out the rest.
4. Check rest and hours: enough rest between the end of one shift and the next (11–12 hours in most of Europe), and nobody over their contract.
5. Publish it early and announce every change.

What people forget most

• Rest between shifts. Leaving at 11pm and starting again at 7am leaves only 8 hours.
• Night hours, Sundays and holidays, which are often paid differently.
• Vacations and last-minute changes, which mean redoing the schedule and resending it to the whole team.

Always check your local labor rules and agreements.

When the template falls short

That’s why we made Turnativo: you pick a shift and paint it over the days with your finger. It warns you if someone doesn’t get enough rest or goes over their contract, counts nights, Sundays and holidays for you, and when you publish everyone gets their shifts in their own calendar, with nothing to install. And when you change something, it reaches them on its own.

See how Turnativo works