First, second and third shift are just names for the three blocks a 24-hour day gets divided into when a workplace runs longer than one team can cover. First shift is the daytime one, second shift runs from the afternoon into the evening, and third shift covers overnight.
The exact hours are not fixed by any law. They are whatever your employer sets, and they shift by an hour or two between industries. What follows is what the names usually mean in the US.
Shift names and their usual hours
| Shift | Also called | Usual hours |
|---|---|---|
| First shift | Day shift, morning shift | 7:00 am to 3:00 pm, or 8:00 am to 4:00 pm |
| Second shift | Afternoon shift, evening shift, swing shift | 3:00 pm to 11:00 pm, or 4:00 pm to midnight |
| Third shift | Night shift, graveyard shift | 11:00 pm to 7:00 am, or midnight to 8:00 am |
Notice that the three fit together with no gaps. That is the whole point: the handover from one shift to the next is the moment the work carries on, so shifts are usually set to butt up against each other or overlap by fifteen minutes.
In a hospital or a factory running 12-hour shifts, this breaks down and you get two shifts a day instead of three, typically 7 to 7. The names still get used loosely, so if someone says second shift in a 12-hour operation, ask what time they actually mean.
Swing, graveyard and split shifts
Graveyard shift is third shift. Same thing, older name, and still the most common way people refer to the overnight block in conversation.
Swing shift is the confusing one, because it has two meanings in real use. Most often it means second shift, the block that swings between day and night. But some employers use it for a rotating pattern where you swing across all three shifts over a few weeks. Both usages are common enough that it is worth asking which one a job posting means before you accept it.
Split shift is different from all of these. It is two separate blocks in one day with a long unpaid gap in the middle, say 6 to 10 in the morning and 4 to 8 in the evening. Restaurants and transit run them around meal rushes and commutes. The catch is that you are tied to the workplace for fourteen hours to get paid for eight, and a few states require extra pay to make up for it.
Does second or third shift pay more?
Often, but not because the law says so. No federal rule requires extra pay for working evenings, nights or weekends. The Fair Labor Standards Act cares about how many hours you work, not which hours they were.
What most employers offer instead is a shift differential, which is extra pay added for the less popular shifts. It is usually a percentage of the base rate, and in practice second shift attracts a smaller bump than third. If a job advert mentions a differential, get the number in writing, because a vague promise of "night premium" is not a rate.
One thing worth checking: whether the differential counts toward your overtime rate. It usually should, because non-discretionary extra pay gets folded into the regular rate before overtime is worked out. That makes your overtime hours worth slightly more than a straight 1.5 times your base wage.
Which shift is hardest
Third shift, for most people, and the reason is biology rather than the work. Working while your body expects sleep runs against your circadian rhythm, and the research on long-term night work is not encouraging: it is linked to worse sleep quality, higher risk of metabolic problems, and a harder time keeping social plans that everyone else takes for granted.
Second shift has a subtler cost. The hours are easier on your body than nights, but they eat the evening, which is when most social life and family time happens. People often find first shift physically harder to get up for and second shift lonelier.
None of that makes shift work a bad choice. Plenty of people prefer nights for the quiet, the differential, and a commute with no traffic. It is worth going in with clear eyes about which cost you are accepting.
Recording hours when a shift crosses midnight
Third shift creates a practical problem that day shifts never do: the shift starts on one date and ends on another. A timesheet that just stores start and end times without dates will read 23:00 to 07:00 as negative eight hours, and a spreadsheet will happily show it that way.
Two habits fix it. Write shift times in 24-hour format, so 23:00 to 07:00 cannot be misread as an 8am start. And record the date the shift began, then treat the whole shift as belonging to that date, which is what most payroll systems expect.
Overtime is the other trap. Overtime is worked out per workweek, and your workweek has a defined start moment. A night shift that straddles the boundary gets split between two weeks, which can change which week owes overtime.
The practical fix is to let the clock record it rather than reconstructing it later. Time and attendance software stores each session with its own start and end, so an overnight shift is one record rather than two guesses, and short days and overtime are flagged while the period is still open. For working out a single overnight shift by hand, the work hours calculator handles the midnight crossing, and the military time converter has the full 24-hour chart.