Free rota planner
Build a staff rota for the week in your browser. Add your team, drop shifts onto the days, and the planner deducts breaks and totals the hours and wage cost per person as you go. Download it as a CSV or print it. No sign-up, no email, nothing uploaded.
Called a roster where you are? Same tool — it works as a roster planner and roster maker for Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and as a work schedule maker in the US.
Shows the wage cost of the rota
| Staff | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun | Hours | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | |||||||||
| 0 | |||||||||
| 0 | |||||||||
| Daily total | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Your rota saves in this browser only — nothing is uploaded and there is no sign-up. Clearing site data, or opening it on another device, starts a blank week.
How to build a staff rota that holds up
Most rotas are built around the people and then patched when the gaps appear. Building it in the other order takes about the same time and produces far fewer Saturday-night surprises.
- Start with demand, not names. Write down how many people each day needs, and at which hours. A café needs three on Saturday lunch and one on Tuesday afternoon; those are different problems and a single “who’s free?” pass will not solve both.
- Fill the hard slots first. The shifts nobody wants — early Sunday, late Friday — get assigned before the easy ones, because once the pleasant shifts are gone you have no currency left to trade with.
- Check rest between shifts, not just totals. A 22:00 finish followed by an 08:00 start is ten hours of rest and is the single most common breach in a rota that otherwise looks fine on weekly hours.
- Total the cost before you publish. Enter an hourly rate above and the planner shows what the week costs. Finding out you are 15% over budget while the rota is still editable is considerably cheaper than finding out at payroll.
Rota, roster or schedule?
They are the same document under three names. Rota is the UK and Ireland term, from the Latin for wheel — the idea being that shifts rotate through the team. Roster is standard in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and is also the word the armed forces use everywhere. In the US almost nobody says either: it is an employee schedule or a work schedule. If you are searching for software and getting odd results, that vocabulary split is usually why — a staff rota app and an employee scheduling app are the same product sold to two markets.
What a browser-based rota planner cannot do
This tool is deliberately small. It plans a week, it does the arithmetic, and it hands you a file. Four things it does not do, and all four are the reasons teams eventually stop planning rotas this way:
- Your staff cannot see it. The rota lives in your browser. Everyone finds out what they are working when you send the file, and finds out about changes when you send it again.
- It does not know who is available. Holiday requests, sickness and “I can’t do Thursdays this month” live in your head or in a WhatsApp thread, not in the rota, so clashes only surface after publishing.
- Planned hours are not worked hours. The rota says 09:00–17:00. Whether that is what happened is a separate question, and the difference is where unplanned overtime accumulates unnoticed.
- One browser, one person. No shared editing, no history of who changed what, and if you clear site data the rota is gone.
ClockIt does all four: staff see their rota on their phones and get notified when it changes, availability and leave are already in the system so clashes are caught while you build, and the same rota is measured against what people actually clocked so the variance is visible. If you would rather start from a spreadsheet, the free rota and schedule templates cover the usual weekly and shift patterns, and the free online time clock records the punches once the week is running.
Rota planning — FAQs
What is a rota?
A rota is a plan of who works which shifts over a given period, normally a week. It is the standard word in the UK and Ireland; in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa the same thing is called a roster, and in the US it is usually called a work schedule or an employee schedule. The document is identical whichever word you use: staff down one side, days across the top, start and finish times in the cells.
Is this rota planner really free?
Yes, and there is no sign-up. The planner runs entirely in your browser, so you can build a full week's rota, download it and print it without creating an account or entering an email address. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
How do I make a staff rota?
Start from the days you need covered rather than from the people. Work out how many staff each day needs at each part of the day, then fill those slots against availability, then check nobody has been scheduled into a rest-break or maximum-hours problem. Doing it in that order stops the common failure where the rota is built around who asked first and a Saturday evening ends up with one person on.
Does the rota planner handle night shifts that cross midnight?
Yes. Enter a finish time earlier than the start time — 22:00 to 06:00, for example — and the planner treats it as running into the next day and counts eight hours rather than returning a negative number.
How many hours can staff legally work in a week?
In the UK the Working Time Regulations cap the average working week at 48 hours over a 17-week reference period unless the worker has opted out in writing, with 11 hours of rest between shifts and one day off a week. Australia's National Employment Standards set 38 ordinary hours a week plus reasonable additional hours. The US has no federal weekly cap at all — the FLSA only requires overtime pay after 40 hours. Check your own jurisdiction before relying on any figure.
What is the difference between a rota and a timesheet?
A rota is the plan; a timesheet is the record. The rota says someone is due to work 09:00 to 17:00 on Tuesday, and the timesheet says what actually happened — that they clocked in at 09:12 and left at 17:40. Payroll runs on the timesheet, not the rota, which is why the gap between the two is where unplanned overtime hides.
Can I share this rota with my staff?
You can download it as a CSV or print it, then send that around. The planner itself is single-device by design — it saves to your browser, so your team cannot open it, see their own shifts, or be notified when the rota changes. If you need staff to see the rota on their phones and get told when it moves, that is what scheduling software does.