How to make a staff rota in 7 steps

To make a rota, start from the hours your business needs covering and only then look at who you have. Work out how many staff you need at each point of the day, turn that into shifts and check the total against everyone's contracted hours. Then fill the shifts around availability and booked leave, check breaks and rest against UK working time rules, and publish early enough for people to plan around it.

Below, each step is worked through on one example: a high-street café open seven days a week, with seven staff and one of them aged 17. By the end you have the whole week on one page, with every hour accounted for. In the UK the plan is called a rota; in many other countries it is a roster.

The café in this example

The café opens 08:00 to 16:00 on weekdays, 08:00 to 17:00 on Saturday and 09:00 to 16:00 on Sunday. Someone has to be in half an hour before opening to set up and half an hour after closing to clean down, so the rota starts at 07:30, or 08:30 on Sunday.

The team is Priya, the manager, on 37.5 hours a week; Tom on 27.5; Marcus in the kitchen on 30; Ellie on 21; Sam, a student, on 12 at weekends; Jade, who is 17, on 10.5 at weekends; and Kai, who is on a zero-hours contract and picks up what is left. The café pays its breaks, so the length of a shift is also the paid time. The same steps work for a pub, a restaurant or any other hospitality business, and a shop follows the same logic with a few differences covered further down.

Step 1: work out the cover you need, hour by hour

Begin with demand. Pull the last four weeks of till data by hour, or your bookings if you take reservations, and mark when you are busy, steady and quiet. Then write down how many people you need in each part of the day, kitchen included. Count the work that has nothing to do with customers as well: setting up, a delivery, the Monday clean.

The café's till data shows a clear pattern. Weekdays build from a coffee rush before 10:30 to a lunch peak from 11:30 to 14:30, then go quiet. Saturday brunch starts around 11:00 and runs into the afternoon. Sunday is busiest from late morning until 14:00 and quiet after 14:30.

Write the cover as a number of people. "Three on from 11:30" is something you can check on the day, and it tells you straight away where a shift has to start.

Step 2: turn the cover into shifts

Now draw shifts that deliver the cover with as few start times as you can manage. Two or three standard shifts a day are easier to fill, swap and remember than a different time for every person. Start a shift when demand rises and end it when demand drops.

For the café's weekdays that gives three shifts: two openers, 07:30 to 14:30 and 07:30 to 15:00, and a middle shift from 10:30 to 16:30 that carries the lunch peak and closes down. The middle shift starts an hour before the peak on purpose. The two openers take their breaks between 10:30 and 11:30, one after the other, while there are three people in.

Saturday needs four shifts (07:30 to 15:00, 07:30 to 14:30, 09:30 to 15:30 and 11:00 to 17:30) and so does Sunday (08:30 to 14:30, 08:30 to 14:00, 10:00 to 16:30 and 10:00 to 14:30). Added up, the week comes to 152 hours: 20.5 on each weekday, 27 on Saturday and 22.5 on Sunday.

Step 3: check the hours against your contracts

Before you put a single name in, add up the contracted hours and compare them with what the shifts need. First rotas often skip this step, and it is where a gap that was visible on paper turns into a Saturday nobody can cover.

The café's contracts add up to 138.5 hours. The shifts need 152, which leaves 13.5 hours for Kai. In a week where someone is on holiday the gap grows by their hours: if Ellie books the week off, there are 34.5 hours to find, probably more than Kai wants. That is why the check runs every week, and why booked leave goes into it. If the gap is there week after week, the answer is a change of contract or a new hire.

Step 4: collect availability and booked leave

Ask the team for availability before you plan, with a deadline and through one channel. A message thread fills up and gets lost; a form or an app keeps it in one place. Keep what someone cannot work (a college timetable, childcare, a second job) apart from what they would rather not work. The first is fixed, the second is what you balance across the team. There is more on collecting employee availability and planning around it in a separate guide.

Put booked holiday on the rota first, so it shows as a gap before you fill the week. In the café, Sam and Jade can only work weekends because of college and school, Marcus cannot start before 10:30 because of the school run, and Ellie has asked for mornings.

Step 5: put people on shifts and keep the rota fair

Fill the hardest shifts first: the ones that need a particular skill and the ones with the fewest people available. For the café, that means the kitchen first and the weekend second. Then fill the rest around contracts and availability. This is the café's finished week:

Look at the weekend and one thing stands out. Tom works both Saturday and Sunday, and nobody on a weekday contract works either day. One week like that is fine. Every week, and Tom starts looking for another job. A fair rota spreads the shifts people dislike, and the simplest way to see whether yours does is to count. Keep a tally per person of weekend days, closes and early starts over four weeks, and move a shift when one count runs ahead. Here, one Saturday a month Ellie could take Tom's opening shift and Tom her Friday.

Decide in advance how you hand out the shifts everybody wants, such as time off in the week before Christmas. If it is first come, first served every year, the same people win every year.

Step 6: check breaks and rest against UK rules

Before you publish, run the rota past the working time rules. These are the ones GOV.UK lists that matter for a weekly rota:

• A worker on more than six hours a day is entitled to one uninterrupted 20-minute break, somewhere in the middle of the day rather than at the start or end. The break does not have to be paid; the contract decides.

• Workers get 11 hours' rest between working days.

• Each week they get an uninterrupted 24 hours off, or 48 hours every fortnight.

• Nobody works more than 48 hours a week on average, normally averaged over 17 weeks, unless they opt out.

• Workers under 18 who are above school leaving age get a 30-minute break once they work more than 4.5 hours, 12 hours' rest between days and 48 hours off each week, and may work no more than 8 hours a day or 40 a week.

In the café, both weekday openers and four of the weekend shifts run past six hours, so the breaks are planned into the windows where one person more is in than the cover needs. Kai's Sunday break falls at 14:00, when Jade is still in. Jade's Saturday is six hours, so she gets 30 minutes. Her Sunday is exactly 4.5 hours, and the 30-minute break only applies to shifts longer than that. Tom's Sunday is exactly six hours, and the adult break only applies to days longer than six. The tightest rest gap in the week is Sam's: a Saturday finish at 17:30 and a Sunday start at 08:30, which is 15 hours. Exceptions, compensatory rest and night work are in our guide to UK working hours and break rules.

Step 7: publish the rota and handle the changes

Publish as early as you can. Check what your contracts say about notice, and aim for two weeks ahead: early enough for childcare and second jobs, late enough that you know the bookings. For staff on zero-hours contracts like Kai, Acas advises having a clear policy on cancelling work, including the notice you will give.

Once the rota is out, the changes start: a swap agreed in the kitchen that never reaches the rota, a sick call at 06:45. Decide who approves swaps and where open shifts go before the first one arrives, and keep a single version of the rota that everyone looks at. The guide on cutting scheduling admin covers what to do after you publish.

What changes when you make a rota for a shop

A retail rota follows the same seven steps with different inputs. Demand comes from footfall and till transactions per hour rather than bookings, and it moves with paydays, school holidays and the weather. Part of the work has nothing to do with customers: deliveries, replenishment, price changes and stock counts. Give those their own hours, usually early in the morning or after close, so they do not eat into cover on the shop floor.

Check skills per shift as well. Every shift needs someone who can open or lock up, cash up and authorise a refund. A store where only one person can do those things is stuck the day that person is ill.

Making the rota in a spreadsheet or in software

A small team with fixed hours can run a rota from a grid. If you want one to start from, the weekly schedule template in Excel lays out a week by person and day. What a spreadsheet cannot do is show who is on holiday, warn you when a shift runs past someone's contract hours, or tell the team when you move a shift.

In Shiftbase you make the rota in a week view with availability, approved leave and contract hours already in it. Shiftbase flags a shift that lands on someone's time off, overlaps another shift or runs past their contract hours, while you plan. The café's weekday shifts become shift templates that you copy into the next week. Open shifts go to the team to claim, swaps come to you to approve, and publishing sends the week to everyone's app and calendar. Labour cost sits next to your revenue forecast while you build the week.

You can build the week yourself, or let Shiftbase AI draft it from availability, contracts and the shifts you need, then check it and publish it yourself. Try it on next week's rota; every feature is there from day one, with no credit card needed.