Panama Schedule: the 2-2-3 Rotation by Its Other Name

What is the Panama schedule?

The Panama schedule is the 2-2-3 rotation wearing a nickname: 2 days on, 2 days off, 3 days on, 2 days off, 2 days on, 3 days off, repeating every 14 days across four crews of 12-hour workers. The name is widely said to trace back to workers in the Panama Canal Zone, where around-the-clock lock and port operations ran this rhythm — the story is more folklore than documented fact, but the name stuck and spread through U.S. shift-work vocabulary.

One pattern, three names

If you have been told your workplace runs "Panama," "2-2-3," or "Pitman," you are looking at the same family. 2-2-3 is the descriptive name — it spells the rhythm of work and rest days. Panama is the regional nickname, most common in the Southeast, on the Gulf Coast, and in logistics and port-adjacent industries. Pitman is the variant where crews are fixed permanently to days or nights rather than rotating. The calendar math is identical in all three; what changes is crew assignment and local vocabulary. The generator above runs the fixed day/night version, which is what most U.S. workplaces mean by any of the three names.

Who runs the Panama schedule

The name travels with industries that never close. Petrochemical and refining along the Gulf Coast run Panama as the default. Warehousing and fulfillment operations adopted it as 24/7 distribution became the norm. Utilities and power plants use it for control-room coverage. Healthcare and EMS use it too, though those sectors more often say "2-2-3." If you are comparing job offers and one mentions "Panama rotation," you now know exactly what your year looks like: about 182 working days, 26 three-day weekends, and half of all weekends with at least one shift.

The numbers behind the name

Every crew works 7 shifts per 14 days — 84 hours, averaging 42 per week. With a Monday cycle start the weeks alternate 60 hours and 24 hours: a 5-shift week, then a 2-shift week. Every other week ends in a Friday–Sunday 3-day weekend. You may see the hours quoted as 36 and 48 elsewhere — that contradicts the pattern's own structure; 60/24 is the split consistent with 7 shifts per 14 days. For the full structural deep-dive — why the cycle never stacks more than 3 shifts, how it locks onto two-week pay periods — see the 2-2-3 schedule page, which covers the same pattern by its descriptive name.

Make yours

Set the first day of Crew A's cycle above, generate, and print — or save a PDF for each crew. Planning ahead? The Panama schedule 2026 page has the full year pre-baked. All five patterns build from the same rotating shift schedule generator on the home page.