Rolling rota
A rolling rota is a cycle that repeats and moves forward, instead of the same Monday every week. Four days on and four days off, or a pattern that starts on a different weekday each time it turns, is the idea. The cycle is a planning habit. The law still looks at the hours.
A cycle is not a template in the product
Shiftbrook does not ship a catalogue of named patterns. There is no button for four on four off, a continental week, or a Panama cycle. You add the shifts, or you copy a week you already built. Copying last week repeats that week. It does not rotate a longer cycle by itself. If the cycle is eight days, a Monday-to-Sunday copy will drift off the pattern unless you place the days that fall outside the copied week.
Publish the dates people need to see, with enough notice to plan a life. A draft is private. An open shift shows a gap once it is published. Leave sits on the same grid, so the cycle does not silently put someone in on a day they have already booked. The shift-patterns entry lists the names people use. This entry is about the fact that the cycle and the calendar week are not the same object.
Rest does not pause for the cycle
A neat rotation can still miss 11 hours between the last night and the next start, or miss a 24-hour weekly rest. The 48-hour average is usually taken over 17 weeks, which may cut across several turns of a short cycle. Check the joins, not only whether everyone had the same number of nights. Young workers have tighter daily and weekly limits and cannot opt out.
Fairness is separate from legality. A rolling rota is one way to share weekends and nights, which is the point of the guide on building a week. The product does not score whether the share is fair. It shows the dates. Holiday accrual does not change because the pattern rolls: a regular number of days each week is still 5.6 weeks, capped at 28 days. If the hours are wholly variable, that is the irregular-hours method, not a feature of the word rolling.