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Paging Load Calculator

Work out paging load instantly with clear inputs, formula shown and shareable results.

About Paging Load Calculator

Paging load per shift, not per week, is what an individual experiences. The threshold that matters is night pages: one or two per week-long shift is tolerable, while five or more guarantees sleep disruption and drives attrition. Growing the rota spreads the load but does not reduce it, so alert volume has to come down first.

Formula

Paging load

pages per shift = pages per week (for weekly shifts); night pages = pages x out-of-hours share; interrupt hours = pages x minutes / 60

Worked example

With the default values below, Paging Load Calculator returns Pages per on-call shift of 14.0. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.

Inputs used

Pages per weekminimum 0
14
Engineers on the rotaminimum 1
6
Share of pages outside working hoursaccepts 0–100 %
40 %
Time spent per pageminimum 0.1 min
35 min

Results

Pages per on-call shift
14.0
Out-of-hours pages per shift
5.6
Hours of interrupt work per shift
8.17 h
Sustainability
Unsustainable - reduce alert volume before growing the rota

Step by step

  1. 1Values used
  2. 2Paging load
  3. 3Pages per on-call shift= 14.0
  4. 4Out-of-hours pages per shift= 5.6
  5. 5Hours of interrupt work per shift= 8.17 h
  6. 6Sustainability= Unsustainable - reduce alert volume before growing the rota

Assumptions and limits

  • The result is derived only from the 4 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
  • In particular, this calculator does not take inflation, tax, fees or charges or compounding frequency into account.
  • Figures are rounded for display to 2 decimal places, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.

How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a reasonable page budget?

Google's SRE book suggests no more than about two incidents per 12-hour shift, so responders have time to investigate properly rather than just acknowledging.

Does adding engineers fix an overloaded rota?

It reduces the frequency any one person is on call but not the total interruption. If pages per shift stay high, every shift is still miserable.

Related Calculators

Paging Load Calculator – Calculate Pages per on-call shift