Shift pattern earnings planner

What the planner does

Prison officers work rolling shift patterns, and the first question most people ask about a pattern is what it pays. The honest answer, on the sources we could verify, is both simpler and more surprising than the question assumes. This planner lets you build your actual rota as a repeating pattern of up to six weeks, choosing rest, day, long day or night for every day, with the hours for each type editable. It then tells you what the pattern contains: average hours a week, nights a year, weekend shifts a year, the share of your hours that are unsocial, and how your rota compares with your contracted hours. And it combines that with your band, pay point, zone and contract to show the earnings and take-home that go with it.

The results update as you edit a day. A month-by-month chart shows how contracted pay and any extras build across the 2026/27 tax year, a pay-composition chart shows how much of your gross is basic pay, allowance, additional hours and extras, and a rota-facts table gives your hours worked, your contracted pay per hour worked and your night hours. A paid tab compares a second rota or contract side by side, and the AI assistant answers one question about your own rota free.

What is verified about shift pay for officers

For Bands 3 to 5 in England and Wales, the Pay Review Body and HMPPS describe unsocial hours as a flat allowance of 20% of contracted hours, which is pensionable and already included in the published salary. Night, evening, weekend and bank or public holiday working are covered by that allowance, not by separate hourly premiums. So on the published rules, two officers on the same band, point, zone and contract earn the same contracted pay even if one works twelve nights a month and the other works none. We say 'on the published rules' deliberately: we found no separate night, weekend or bank holiday premium, but the Review Body will review unsocial hours payments in its 2027 Report and HMPPS is reviewing night working with the POA, and your own contract or local agreement may contain something we have not seen.

Beyond contracted pay, there are exactly two published extras that depend on when you work. Payment Plus pays £23 an hour for specific operational duties on a non-working day or outside your scheduled shift pattern, and it is the only overtime-type payment for Bands 3 to 5. Band 2 Operational Support Grades are paid overtime at 1.33 times the base hourly rate on weekdays and 1.75 times at weekends and public or bank holidays, plus a permanent £5 an hour. The planner includes both. There are also a handful of role-specific payments, such as the on-call allowances, the dirty protest allowance and the specialist allowances, which depend on duties rather than a rota and are not modelled here.

How to build your rota

1. Choose how many weeks your pattern repeats before it starts again, from one to six.
2. For each day, pick rest, day, long day or night. A night counts on the day it starts. The default pattern is an example only; it is not an HMPPS pattern.
3. Set the hours for each shift type. The defaults are placeholders (7.4 for a day, so five days make a 37 hour week, and 12 for a long day or night); change them to match your roster.
4. Check the contract hours in the pay panel. Band 3 officers can choose 37, 38, 39, 40 or 41 hours after training; other bands publish 37 and 39 hours.
5. Add any Payment Plus or Band 2 overtime hours you expect a month, and, only if your contract or payslip shows one, your own night, weekend or bank holiday enhancement.
6. Read the contract-versus-rota comparison first. If your rota averages more hours than your contract, ask how the difference is treated before assuming it is paid.

Hours against contract: the number that matters most

The most useful single figure the planner produces is the gap between the hours your rota actually contains and the hours your contract pays for. Contracted pay is set by the contract. If your rota averages 37.5 hours on a 37 hour contract, the published pay tables do not tell us what happens to the half hour, and we have not found an HMPPS policy that does. Payment Plus does not simply fill the gap, because it is paid only for qualifying duties outside the scheduled pattern. If your rota averages less than your contract, you are being paid for hours you are not rostered for, which is normal for patterns that average out over a cycle.

The planner flags a gap of more than half an hour a week in either direction and shows your contracted pay per hour actually worked. For a Band 3 officer on pay point 3 at 37 hours, contracted pay is £36,778, which is about £19.06 for every contracted hour on our 52.143-week convention. If your rota has you working 40 hours a week for that figure, pay per hour worked is about £17.63, and that is a better number for comparing patterns than the headline salary.

Nights, weekends and bank holidays

Because the allowance is flat, a pattern with many nights earns the same contracted pay as a pattern with none, and the planner shows that plainly in the month-by-month chart, where contracted pay is the same every month. That is not to say nights are irrelevant to pay: the allowance exists because unsocial working is expected, it is pensionable, and it is under review. It is also not a statement about health or fairness. Night working has well-known effects on sleep and wellbeing that no pay figure fixes, and our night shift pay guide covers what is and is not confirmed, including what the law says about night working hours.

Weekends and bank holidays work the same way for officers on the verified rules: they are inside the allowance. For Band 2 staff the weekday and weekend multipliers apply to overtime hours, which is why the planner asks for weekday and weekend hours separately. Our guides on weekend pay and bank holiday pay go through the detail, including the dates of the 2026 and 2027 bank holidays and what is not confirmed about bank holiday leave and privilege days.

Using the planner to compare patterns and contracts

Two comparisons are worth making. The first is between rotas: the same contract and different patterns give the same contracted pay, so the difference is hours, nights and weekends worked for it. The paid comparison tab puts Rota B beside Rota A so you can see that. The second is between contracts: a 41 hour contract adds £4,639 a year gross over 37 hours at Band 3 pay point 3, about £22.24 for each extra weekly hour on our arithmetic, but only makes sense if your rota really delivers those hours. Use the salary calculator to see the after-tax difference, and read contract hours: 37, 39 or 41 before changing.

If you are thinking about a transfer, the prison pages and pay by region show zones and supplements. For planning around childcare or a second job, remember the planner does not know about your leave, sickness or time off in lieu; it models a standard year.

Limits and what we would not guess

The planner is a model of a standard year on a standard tax code (1257L), with 2026/27 tax, National Insurance and alpha rates. It treats your whole published contract pay as pensionable unless you say otherwise, and treats any enhancement you enter as non-pensionable. It does not model annual leave, sick pay, parental leave, one-off payments, back pay, on-call allowances, dirty protest or Operation Tornado payments, specialist allowances, or the rules of any local agreement. We could not verify the HMPPS policy on how additional committed hours are priced or how and when you can change contract, so do not use the planner as evidence in a dispute. Use your payslip, contract and your POA rep for that.

If you would like to see how the year looks with overtime, a promotion or a pay award, Pay Planner Pro builds a twelve month plan with cumulative tax. And the overtime calculator is the quickest way to see what a particular number of Payment Plus hours is worth after tax.