Set work schedules
Tell Equal House the hours each adult works, so the fairness maths stops expecting the same of someone who is at work.
Where to find it
More → Work schedules
A household where one adult works nights and the other is home at four is not unfair when the evening chores land unevenly — it is just a Tuesday. Work schedules let the engine know that.
- More → Work schedules.
- Pick a person and set the hours they work each day.
What it changes
The Fairness Score expects less of someone during the hours they are working. It does not excuse them entirely, and it does not shuffle work automatically — it stops the score treating a full shift as idleness.
Why it is per-day, not a single number
“Works full time” hides the thing that actually matters: when. Two adults on forty hours each can have completely different evenings, and the evening is where most household work lives.
If your weeks are not all the same
A fixed week has no answer for shift work: four-on-four-off has no “Tuesday”, because it depends which Tuesday. So under a person’s weekly schedule there is Weeks not all the same?, which opens a rota you set by real dates.
A date you set there wins over the usual week. A date you leave blank still follows it — so you only ever have to enter the days you actually know.
Marking a day off is not the same as leaving it blank
This is the part worth reading twice.
- Blank — follow the usual weekly schedule.
- Off — do not work this day, whatever the usual week says.
“I normally work Mondays, but not this one” is only sayable with Off. Clearing the day instead sends you straight back to the usual week, and back to work.
Filling in a year without typing it
Nobody keeps a rota up to date one day at a time, so there are four ways in:
- From a photo — photograph the printed rota and we read the shifts off it. Nothing is saved until you have checked the list; anything we were unsure of is left out rather than guessed at.
- Days on and days off — four on, four off, or any continuous pattern from a start date.
- Repeat a block of weeks — build one or two weeks by hand, then run that cycle forward.
- Copy a week — duplicate one week onto another, for the rota no pattern quite fits.
A pattern never overwrites a day you typed by hand, so a correction survives the next time you extend it.
Shifts you enter also show on the family calendar, so everyone can see who is at work.
When the rota runs out
Rotas are published a few weeks at a time, and Equal House quietly falls back to your usual week once yours is used up — which is the sort of wrong nobody notices. So the app tells you before that happens, and the rota screen shows the date it runs to.
Whose business it is
Any adult in the household can see and set these, in the same way they can see the calendar. It is a shared picture or it is not much use.
If it looks wrong
Check the capacity share on the person too — that is the blunter setting, applied all the time, and the two work together. Someone with both a low capacity share and a full schedule is being discounted twice.
Updated 3 September 2026. Something here wrong or missing? Tell us — we'd rather fix the page than answer it twice.
