One night. Twenty-five hours. Is your rota ready for the clocks going back?
Oct 23, 2026
Most of the country will treat the clocks going back as a gift. An extra hour in bed. A lighter Sunday morning. A brief, glorious sense of having beaten time.
If you run a care home, a hotel or a late-night venue, it's a different story. Care doesn't pause for the clocks. Neither does a bar at closing time. For the people working through the night, the extra hour isn't a lie-in. It's an hour of work, and somebody needs to make sure it's on the rota, on the timesheet and in the pay packet.
Here's what changes on Sunday 25 October, where it trips shift-based teams up, and how to keep it from turning into a Monday-morning payroll problem.
What actually happens when the clocks go back?
At 2am on Sunday 25 October, UK clocks go back to 1am. The hour between 1am and 2am happens twice, which makes Sunday a 25-hour day.
On paper, that's neat. In practice, any shift that runs through the changeover is an hour longer than its start and end times suggest.
Take a care home night shift that runs from 10pm to 7am. Normally, that's nine hours. On the night of Saturday 24 October, your team will work ten.
A rota built on clock times will still say nine. The people who worked the shift will know it was ten. That gap is where the trouble starts.
Where the extra hour catches shift-based teams out
It only affects a small slice of the week. But it lands on the places where precision matters most: residential care, hospitality, hotels and anywhere with overnight cover.
Pay that doesn't match the shift
If your schedule says nine hours and your team worked ten, someone's wrong. Either you underpay the people who stayed up to keep residents safe, or you overpay the ones who didn't work the extra hour.
Questions your team will ask on Monday
Was I paid for the extra hour? Why does my timesheet say something different from my rota? Who was covering between 1am and 2am?
Those are fair questions, and they're far easier to answer ahead of time than on the Tuesday after. If you've agreed how the extra hour is handled and told your team in advance, there's nothing to argue about.
And if you haven't, expect a few messages.
Tired teams and tricky handovers
Good care is continuous. The same familiar faces, shifts that don't leave gaps, and a handover that happens when it should. An extra hour at the tail end of a night shift can quietly blur all three.
Rest matters in real hours, not clock hours, and it's already a sore spot. Planday's research with The Burnt Chef Project found that 69% of shift workers regularly feel exhausted because of their work schedule. A changeover weekend you haven't planned for doesn't help.
Records you can stand behind
With the Fair Work Agency now up and running, and inspectors asking who was on shift and when, being able to show what was scheduled, what was worked and what was paid matters more than it used to. A changeover weekend where those three numbers don't line up is the one you'd most like a clean record of.
Your before-25-October checklist
You don't need to rebuild your rota. You need to look at the right shifts, make a decision and tell people about it. In order:
Find every shift that runs through 1am to 2am on Sunday 25 October. Night shifts, late closes and anything that starts before the changeover and ends after it.
Decide how you'll handle the extra hour. Some employers pay for it as worked time. Others agree something different with their team. Check your contracts, and make the call before the weekend, not after payroll.
Update the shift lengths so the hours on your rota match the hours your team actually work.
Tell your team. A short message about how changeover shifts will run and be paid saves a lot of questions later.
Check your Sunday morning cover. Make sure early starters have had enough rest, and that nobody's relying on an hour they don't have.
Keep a record. If someone asks what happened on the night of 24 October, you want an answer you can find in seconds.
How Planday keeps the extra hour on the rota, not on your mind
Planday treats a shift as one unbroken block of time, so a shift that runs through the changeover keeps its start and end times. That means paid hours for those shifts need a quick manual update; you add the extra hour. We don't want you finding that out in the payroll run, so we make it hard to miss.
We tell you. If you've got a shift scheduled across the changeover, we'll email you and flag it on your schedule page a week before, so you know exactly which shifts to check.
The fix takes a few taps. Open the shift, change its length and you're done. Our Help Centre has a step-by-step guide to updating Planday shifts for the end of daylight saving time.
Your team can see what's happened. Publish the updated rota and your team sees it on their phones straight away, so nobody's guessing when they're in or what they're getting paid for.
Actual hours sit next to scheduled hours. With Punch Clock, your team clocks in and out from their phone. You can compare what was scheduled with what was worked, so a gap shows up before payroll, not after.
Timesheets are ready to approve. Hours are logged against the shift they belong to, so approving them takes minutes. And when you're ready, they flow into payroll without re-keying.
Cover is quick to arrange. If the changeover weekend leaves a gap, post an open shift, and available team members can pick it up from the app. No phone tree. No group chat.
The records are all in one place. Rotas, hours and approvals live in the same platform, so what was scheduled, what was worked and what was paid is easy to show.
None of this is complicated. It's just the sort of thing that's easy to miss when you're also running a care home on a weekend.
Make the extra hour a non-event
The clocks go back twice a year. Every time, the teams that sail through it are the ones who looked at the rota a week early.
Planday helps you do exactly that. You see which shifts need attention, you sort them in a few taps, and your team knows where it stands. One night. Twenty-five hours. Rota's got it.
Want to see how Planday makes your next shift more predictable? Explore how Planday can support your team, or book a demo to see it in action.
Book your demo