The 4/10 and 9/80 Schedules Explained: Where the Extra Day Off Actually Comes From

Somebody in your shop is going to describe a compressed schedule as "a three-day weekend, every week" or "every other Friday off." That's true, and it's also the least useful sentence anyone will say to you about it.

Here's the more honest version: you are working the same forty hours. Nothing was subtracted. The hours were picked up from one place and set down in another, and every real consequence of a compressed schedule — good and bad — comes from where they got set down.

Two versions of this are common enough to have names.

The 4/10: four days, ten hours each

Four ten-hour days, three days off, forty hours. Police departments run it, dispatch centers run it, public works and utilities run it, and plenty of government offices and maintenance shops run it. It is the simplest compressed schedule there is, and its appeal is obvious: a third day off every week, and one fewer commute.

Both of those are real. So is the part that doesn't get said out loud, which is that the ten-hour day does not feel like an eight-hour day with a little extra on the end. Two hours come out of the same evening that already had to hold dinner, errands, kids, and sleep. A 6-to-4 becomes a 6-to-6. The thing that gets compressed isn't the week — it's the four days you're still in.

Whether that trade is worth it is genuinely personal, and people who love the 4/10 and people who quietly hate it usually aren't disagreeing about facts. They're weighting the same trade differently.

The 9/80: eight nine-hour days, one eight-hour day, and a line through the middle of a Friday

The 9/80 is the same idea stretched over two weeks. You work eight nine-hour days and one eight-hour day — that's eighty hours — and the tenth day is off. In practice it usually reads as every other Friday off.

Count it out and you'll notice a problem. Nine, nine, nine, nine, eight is forty-four hours. The other week is thirty-six. Under the FLSA, overtime is owed on hours past forty in a workweek, so on a plain Sunday-to-Saturday calendar this schedule generates four hours of overtime every other week, forever, for a schedule that averages exactly forty.

The fix is not in the schedule. It's in the definition of the week.

An employer may designate when its workweek starts, and on a 9/80 that designation is moved to the midpoint of the eight-hour day. If your short Friday runs 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., the workweek boundary is set at noon. The first four hours of that Friday close out one workweek at forty hours. The last four hours open the next one, which then picks up the following four nine-hour days and lands on forty as well. Two clean forty-hour weeks, no overtime, same calendar (common pitfalls in using 9/80 schedules, Liebert Cassidy Whitmore).

This is worth understanding for a reason that has nothing to do with payroll trivia. It means that on a 9/80, your Friday is two different weeks, and there is an invisible line running through the middle of it. Most of the things that seem arbitrary about a 9/80 are that line doing its job:

• Staying two hours late on a Friday morning is not the same as staying two hours late on a Friday afternoon. One of them lands in a week that's already full.
• Swapping your day off with someone on the opposite Friday rotation can put nine extra hours into a week that has no room for them.
• Leaving early on the "wrong" Friday can leave one of the two weeks short even though your total for the period is fine.

None of that is your employer being difficult. It's a forty-hour ceiling that sits in a place you can't see on the calendar.

The one that catches everybody: leave banks are in hours, your day isn't

This is the part nobody mentions at orientation, and it's the same on both schedules.

Paid time off, sick leave, and holidays are almost always accrued and paid in hours. Your workday, on a compressed schedule, is ten hours (or nine). Those two units don't match.

So when a holiday falls on a scheduled ten-hour day and the holiday is credited at eight hours, you are two hours short of a full day, and something has to cover it — vacation, comp time, a flex arrangement, or an unpaid gap. Take a single sick day and you spend ten hours of a bank you've been accruing at forty hours a week. Nothing has been stolen from you; the accrual rate is the same. But the number of days your bank buys is smaller than it was on a five-day schedule, and if you plan time off by counting days instead of hours, you will run out earlier than you expected to.

Worth checking, in your own policy, before you need it:

• How are holidays credited — eight hours flat, or the length of your scheduled shift?
• What covers the gap if a holiday is credited short, and is using vacation for it mandatory or optional?
• Is leave charged by the hour or by the day? Both exist, and they are very different on a ten-hour schedule.
• What happens to your accrual if you move on or off the compressed schedule mid-year?

Whether they can put you on it, and whether they can take you off it

Federal law is close to silent here. The FLSA cares about hours past forty in a workweek and has nothing to say about ten-hour days as such, so in most of the country a compressed schedule is simply a scheduling decision.

California is the significant exception, and it's specific enough to be worth knowing if you work there. California pays daily overtime after eight hours. To run a 4/10 without triggering it, the employer has to adopt a formal alternative workweek schedule, and that requires a secret-ballot election passed by at least a two-thirds vote of the affected employees in the work unit, held before the work is performed. Under an adopted alternative workweek, hours up to ten in a day are straight time; past the regularly scheduled hours, overtime applies, and past twelve hours in a day it's double time (Industrial Welfare Commission wage order, California DIR).

The practical read: in California your 4/10 exists because a group of people voted for it, which also means it is a thing with a paper trail — a proposal, a work unit, a ballot. Elsewhere, and in most union shops in either case, the answer lives in your contract rather than in a statute. That's the document to ask for, not the labor code.

What to actually verify before you say yes

• Which workweek you're on, and — if it's a 9/80 — where the boundary falls on the short day. This is a specific time on a specific day, and someone in payroll knows it.
• How overtime is triggered: past forty in the designated week, past your scheduled shift, or both.
• How holidays and leave are credited against a nine- or ten-hour day.
• Whether swaps and flex are allowed across the workweek boundary, and who approves them.
• What the exit looks like — how much notice before the schedule changes back, and what happens to the accrual difference.

The thing compressed schedules are actually good at

They make your time off arrive in bigger pieces.

That sounds like a small distinction and it isn't. A single day off is enough for errands. Three consecutive days is enough for a trip, a project, a real visit, a recovery from a bad stretch. Most of the value people get from a 4/10 or a 9/80 isn't the hour count — it's that the off time is no longer sliced thin enough to disappear into laundry.

The cost is that the working days are longer, the leave math is less forgiving, and — on a 9/80 — one day of your fortnight belongs to two different weeks at once, in a way that will not appear anywhere on the calendar hanging in your break room.

That's the real trade. It's a good one for a lot of people. It's just not the one described by "every other Friday off."