2-2-3 Schedule (Panama): the 14-Day Rotating Pattern

What is the 2-2-3 schedule?

The 2-2-3 schedule — also known as the Panama schedule — is a 14-day rotating pattern for workplaces that run around the clock. Four crews of 12-hour workers share coverage: on every day, one crew works days, one crew works nights, and two crews rest. The name comes from its rhythm: 2 days on, 2 days off, 3 days on, 2 days off, 2 days on, 3 days off. Then it repeats.

How the 14-day cycle works

Each crew works 7 shifts per 14 days — 84 hours, an average of 42 hours per week. Aligned to a Monday start, that plays out as a 60-hour week followed by a 24-hour week: the long week covers Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and the short week is just Wednesday and Thursday. You may see the hours quoted elsewhere as 36 and 48 — that math does not survive contact with the actual pattern; the weekly split is 60 and 24, and every credible roster of the pattern confirms it.

Two setups exist. In the fixed version (sometimes called Pitman), day crews stay on days and night crews stay on nights, usually with a night differential. In the rotating version, crews swap between days and nights every cycle or two. The generator above runs the fixed version, which is what most U.S. workplaces mean when they say 2-2-3.

Why workers love it

Ask people who work it and the answers are remarkably consistent. You never work more than 3 days in a row, so fatigue never compounds the way it does on longer stretches. Every other week ends in a 3-day weekend — 26 long weekends a year. And the short weeks feel genuinely short: workers coming from 5-day, 9-to-10-hour schedules describe the 2-2-3 as getting their lives back. All told, you work about 182 days a year instead of roughly 260.

The honest trade-offs

The pattern has one structural annoyance: your days off drift through the week, so there is no fixed “your Tuesday.” People on the pattern say every plan starts with opening the calendar. Half of all weekends include at least one shift — that is the cost of the 3-day weekends on the other half. And the built-in overtime cuts both ways: workers like the bigger checks, but payroll teams should price the overtime hours honestly, especially in states like California that count overtime daily rather than weekly.

Who uses it

EMS crews, hospital nursing units, police departments, call centers, and manufacturing plants — anywhere 24/7 coverage matters and retention does too. If you are weighing it against the DuPont schedule, the choice is emotional as much as arithmetic: DuPont offers perfect predictability and a 7-day break; the 2-2-3 offers short weeks and long weekends. One more practical note: because the cycle is 14 days, it locks neatly onto the two-week pay periods most U.S. employers already run, which keeps overtime accounting simpler than longer patterns.

Make yours

Set the first day of your cycle above and print — or save as a PDF and send each crew its own copy. Both this and the DuPont pattern build from the same rotating shift schedule generator on the home page.