Free template · Excel, PDF and CSV
A nurse schedule template with the ratio row the others leave out
A nurse schedule template is a reusable grid of nursing staff against days, with a shift code in each cell. This one adds the block that makes it a nursing schedule rather than a staff list: enter the census and the ratio your unit is held to, and the sheet counts the nurses you have rostered against the nurses that day needs.
Free · No account · Sent to your inbox
Where can I download a free nurse schedule template?
Here: the buttons below. Enter your email address and we send the files to your inbox. No account, no card.
The spreadsheet opens in Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice or Numbers, and its totals are live formulas that recalculate as you type. The PDF is laid out landscape, ready to print for a wall. Also available as a CSV or a printable web page.
What is in it
- Paid hours per nurse, read from a Shift codes table you can edit (D and N are 12 hours, E is 8, OC and PTO count as no shift), with an Over flag against your weekly limit.
- A coverage block per day, with day and night each against its own ratio: census, nurses required, and an over/under that turns red when you are short.
- A license expiry column that turns amber within 30 days and red once the date has passed.
- Weekend shifts per nurse, and a clock-change row that adds the real extra hour to a night that runs 13.
- Thirty nurse rows against a seven-day week from the date you pick, a shift-code dropdown in every day cell, and three worked examples to overwrite.
At a glance
- A nurse schedule template is a weekly grid, one row per nurse, one column per day, with a shift code in each cell: D for day, N for night, E for evening, OC for on call, PTO for approved time off.
- This one carries a coverage block: enter the day's census and the patients-per-nurse ratio your unit works to, and it calculates nurses required and whether you are over or under, for days and nights separately.
- The spreadsheet carries live formulas: shifts, paid hours and weekend shifts per nurse, an Over flag against your weekly hours limit, and the scheduled counts and over/under, all recalculating as you type into the grid.
- It comes as Excel, PDF or CSV, all built from the same sheet. The PDF is laid out landscape for the break-room wall, and shows the calculated figures for the rows as printed.
- A spreadsheet records what you decided. It will colour a license that lapses on Thursday, and still let you roster that nurse for Friday.
What is a nurse schedule template?
A nurse schedule template is a reusable grid of nursing staff against days, filled in with a shift code, that turns next week's roster from a blank page into an editing job.
The grid is the easy part and every template on the web has one. What separates a nursing rota from a shift grid with nurses in it is that a nurse is not interchangeable with another nurse: she holds a license with an expiry date, a set of certifications, a competency for the unit she is standing on, and a contract that says how many hours she agreed to. A template cannot enforce any of that. It can, at least, put the facts where somebody will see them, which is why the license expiry column sits next to the name here rather than in a separate compliance folder.
The other thing a nursing rota has that a shift grid does not is a denominator. Four nurses is a good Tuesday on a unit of twenty and a bad one on a unit of forty, and the number that decides which is the census, a figure that lives nowhere on a normal template. So it lives on this one.
What should a nurse schedule include?
At a minimum: every nurse's name and role, a shift code for each day, the total each person is carrying, the census, and the coverage those shifts actually produce against it.
Most of that is uncontroversial. The last two are the ones that get left off, and leaving them off is how a rota comes to be correct on paper and short on the floor, because a grid of names looks full at a glance regardless of how many patients are in the beds. A coverage row is not a nicety. It is the only part of the sheet that can disagree with you.
The columns that earn their place
Name and role, because an RN and an LPN are not the same row of the ratio. License expiry, because it is the fact most likely to be discovered late. A shift code per day, kept to five values so the grid stays readable at arm's length. Per-nurse shifts and paid hours, so the person carrying six shifts is visible before payroll finds her.
The coverage block
Census per day, the ratio your unit works to, nurses required, and the over/under. Required is census divided by the ratio, rounded up: you cannot roster four-fifths of a nurse. A negative over/under is a day you are short, and it is worth more than any amount of confidence about how the week looks.
Day and night counted separately
A ratio applies to a shift, not to a date. A day with six nurses on it can be perfectly staffed at 08:00 and two short at 23:00, and a single count per day averages that away into a number that is true of no moment in the actual day. The sheet counts D and N separately for that reason, each against its own patients-per-nurse ratio.
How do I build a nursing rota?
Fix the coverage you need before you write a single name, then fill the hardest shifts first and let the easy ones fall out at the end.
The order matters more than the tooling. Start from the census you expect and the ratio you work to, which gives you a required number per shift per day. That is the target, and it is the only thing on the page that is not negotiable. Then place the constrained people: the nights, the person who is unavailable Thursday, the two staff whose competencies are the only ones that cover the unit. Nurses with wide availability are the easiest to place and should therefore be placed last, because every one you place early removes an option from a problem that has not been solved yet.
Then do the pass that nobody enjoys: read down each person's row rather than across each day's column. The grid is built column by column and it fails row by row: six shifts in seven days, a night finishing at 07:00 followed by a day starting at 07:00 the same morning, someone on their fourth consecutive twelve. Those are invisible while you are filling in Tuesday and obvious the moment you read a single nurse's week.
Publish it somewhere with a version and a date. Not because anyone will read the version, but because a rota that exists in four inboxes at three revisions is a rota where two nurses will arrive for the same shift and neither of them will be wrong.
What this template cannot check for you
Everything that matters most: it can colour a license expiry but not act on it, it cannot count rest between shifts, and it cannot refuse.
The license column turns amber a month out and red once the date has passed, and the grid beside it will accept the name anyway. The Over flag will tell you a nurse is past her hours and let you keep her there. The over/under row will show you a shortfall and let you publish it. Nothing here compares a night ending at 07:00 with a day starting at 07:00, and nothing here knows that the same nurse is also on the rota at your second site. A spreadsheet is a record of a decision, and it is genuinely good at that; it has no view about whether the decision was allowed.
That is the boundary of the artefact, not a complaint about it. Most units run on exactly this and are fine, because the charge nurse is carrying all of the above in her head and is usually right. It stops being fine at the point where nobody can hold it all: more staff than a screen, more than one site, agency and per-diem in the mix, a state survey asking what the coverage was on the fourteenth. That is where MedAligna refuses the assignment rather than recording it, and blocks a Friday shift for a license that lapses on Thursday. It is the same grid, with an opinion.
Questions people actually ask
- Do I have to give an email address to get it?
- Yes, and nothing else: no account and no card. We email you the links to the files, so the template is in your inbox whenever you need it again.
- What do the shift codes mean?
- D is a 12-hour day, N a 12-hour night, E an 8-hour evening, OC on call and PTO approved time off; an empty cell is a day off. OC and PTO are not counted as shifts and carry no paid hours. The codes live in a Shift codes table under the grid, and the totals read it: change a code's paid hours (11.5 if you deduct an unpaid break) or add a code in a spare row, and every total follows. Five codes to start is deliberate: the grid has to be legible from arm's length on a break-room wall, and a legend of eleven abbreviations is one nobody reads.
- Can I open it in Excel or Google Sheets?
- Both. There is a real .xlsx for Excel, and a CSV that Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers all read. Either way the paid hours, the counts and the over/under rows are live formulas that recalculate as you type.
- How do I change the ratio?
- Type over the number in the ratio cell; there is one for day shifts and one for nights, and the sheet points at both. Nurses required is census divided by that figure, rounded up, per shift per day. The sheet applies whatever ratio you give it; it does not know which one your unit is held to.
- Can I use it for a whole month?
- It is built as a week, because a legible week beats an illegible month and most units re-plan weekly anyway. If you would rather work a month at a time, download it four times, picking each week's start date above the buttons, and keep the four sheets in one workbook.
- What does a typical nurse work schedule look like?
- On an inpatient unit in the US, three 12-hour shifts a week, which is 36 hours and counts as full time at most hospitals, on a 07:00–19:00 day or a 19:00–07:00 night, with every second or third weekend worked. The three shifts are often grouped so a nurse works consecutive days and then has four off. Clinics and outpatient settings run 8- or 10-hour weekday shifts instead. A rotating nursing schedule moves people between days and nights on a cycle; a fixed one keeps a night nurse on nights. The template above is the 12-hour inpatient week, and the rotating generator lays the four-team patterns onto real dates.
Related
When the grid stops being able to say no
MedAligna is the same rota with the rules attached: a license lapsing Thursday cannot be scheduled for Friday, and the coverage row turns red the day it falls short. Fourteen days free, no card.