Week On, Week Off Custody Schedule
Week on, week off is exactly what it sounds like. Seven nights with one parent, seven with the other, exchanging on the same day every week.
It is the simplest equal schedule that exists, and for the families it fits, it is hard to beat.
The pattern
A fourteen-day cycle. Parent A has days 1–7, Parent B has days 8–14, and it repeats. The exchange usually happens Friday after school or Sunday evening.
Split: 50/50. Seven overnights each per fortnight.
Who it suits
Older children. Roughly eight and up, and increasingly well as they approach their teens. A week is a long time for a small child and an ordinary length of time for a twelve-year-old.
Parents who live apart. This is the schedule with the fewest exchanges — twenty-six a year against more than a hundred for 2-2-3. If you are forty minutes apart, that difference is the whole argument.
Households that need routine. One set of clothes, one set of homework, one bedtime, for seven days at a time. Children with a lot of activities often do better with fewer transitions than with more contact.
Parents who work shifts or travel. A week on is easier to plan around than scattered days.
Who it does not suit
Young children. Under about six, a week without the other parent is a long absence, and the research on young children generally favours shorter gaps rather than longer blocks. This is the main reason families move to it later rather than starting with it.
Anyone who needs frequent contact to feel settled — a child or a parent. Seven days is seven days.
Families where one parent cannot realistically manage a full week because of work patterns. A schedule you cannot actually run produces more conflict than a lopsided one you can.
The clause that makes or breaks it
Midweek contact. Almost every family that runs week-on-week-off successfully has something in the middle — a dinner, an overnight, or a scheduled call on Wednesday.
Without it, a seven-day gap starts to feel like a fortnight to a child who is missing someone. With it, the same schedule feels ordinary.
Write it into the plan. "The off-duty parent shall have Wednesday dinner from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m." is a clause. "We'll be flexible about midweek" is not.
Choosing the exchange day
Friday hands over the weekend with the week, which means each parent gets a full weekend every fortnight, and school-week logistics stay with one household. Most families land here.
Sunday evening starts each parent's week on Monday, which keeps the school week clean but splits the weekend either side of the handover.
Monday morning at school avoids a face-to-face exchange entirely, which for high-conflict families is worth more than the tidiness of either alternative.
Where Civly fits
Week-on-week-off is easy to describe and surprisingly easy to lose track of — mostly because holidays and swaps break the rhythm and then nobody is sure whose week it is.
Civly runs the pattern as a shared calendar both parents see, with holiday provisions layered on top as overrides, so the answer to "whose week is it" is the same on both phones. Swaps go through as requests that need confirming rather than as texts that get remembered differently.
If your order is already written, the AI reads it and sets the pattern up from the document rather than asking you to reconstruct it.
This is general information, not legal advice. What schedule is appropriate for your family depends on your circumstances and your state's law. Talk to a family law attorney licensed where you live.