On-Call During Holidays

Holiday on-call coverage creates unique pressure that normal scheduling doesn’t match. Family gatherings, religious observances, travel plans, and cultural celebrations compete directly with operational responsibilities. Engineers forced to choose between Thanksgiving dinner with extended family and responding to production alerts face a choice that builds lasting resentment.

The problem extends beyond individual stress. Reduced staffing during holidays means fewer people available for escalation, slower context gathering, and degraded response capacity. Organizations that treat holidays as normal rotation periods discover their best engineers eventually leave for companies with more sustainable practices.

This guide covers strategies for planning holiday on-call coverage that maintains necessary reliability while respecting the people who keep your systems running.

Why Holidays Require Different Planning

Holiday periods differ fundamentally from normal operations. Understanding these differences shapes effective coverage strategies.

Personal Cost Is Higher

Weekend on-call disrupts personal time, but holiday on-call disrupts irreplaceable moments. You can reschedule a Saturday brunch. You cannot reschedule your child’s first Christmas morning or your grandmother’s final Thanksgiving gathering.

The psychological weight of holiday interruptions exceeds comparable weekday or weekend disruptions. An alert at 2 PM on a random Tuesday costs attention and time. The same alert during Christmas dinner costs a family memory that cannot be recovered.

Engineers remember holiday incidents for years. Those memories influence career decisions.

Staffing Is Already Reduced

During normal weeks, multiple engineers might be available for escalation even when not on primary call. During holidays, vacation schedules reduce available expertise dramatically. Your database specialist is visiting family across the country. Your network expert is on a cruise with limited connectivity. Your most experienced incident commander is at a cabin without cell service.

Holiday incidents operate with skeleton crew escalation. Problems that would take thirty minutes with full staff availability might take hours when the only available engineer is on-call alone.

Response Expectations Change

Customers also observe holidays. B2B services often see dramatically reduced traffic during major holidays. Consumer services might see peaks or troughs depending on the holiday type.

This traffic variation enables different response expectations. Degraded performance that would be crisis-level on Black Friday might be acceptable on Christmas Day when few customers are active. Organizations that match coverage intensity to actual business impact avoid unnecessary engineer burden.

Family Obligations Create Hard Constraints

Unlike weekday evening plans or weekend activities, holiday obligations often involve extended family, travel, and time-limited gatherings. Engineers can’t simply “step away for an hour” from Thanksgiving dinner with relatives they see once a year.

Holiday on-call either prevents participation entirely or creates ongoing anxiety that poisons the experience. Being physically present but mentally monitoring your phone for alerts isn’t being present at all.

For deeper exploration of how availability burden extends beyond actual incidents, see our guide on On-Call Basics.

Planning Holiday Coverage in Advance

Effective holiday coverage starts with advance planning, not last-minute scrambling.

Define Holiday Policy Explicitly

Create explicit organizational policy about holiday on-call expectations rather than leaving interpretation to individual managers.

Key policy decisions:

• Which holidays require coverage and which accept operational risk?
• Is holiday coverage mandatory rotation or voluntary?
• What compensation applies to holiday coverage?
• How far in advance must holiday schedules be published?
• What approval process exists for holiday time-off requests?

Written policy prevents inconsistent treatment across teams and enables engineers to plan personal commitments around clear expectations.

Identify Truly Required Coverage

Not every service requires holiday coverage. Some systems can safely accept delayed response during major holidays.

Questions to evaluate necessity:

• What is the business impact of delayed holiday response?
• Do SLAs specifically require holiday coverage, or is this assumed?
• What percentage of incidents during past holidays were truly urgent?
• Could automated remediation handle common holiday issues?
• Would customers notice delayed response during their own holiday observance?

Many organizations discover they’ve maintained holiday coverage “because we always have” rather than because business requirements demand it. Re-evaluating necessity might eliminate unnecessary burden entirely.

Build Volunteer-First Systems

When holiday coverage is genuinely required, prioritize volunteer-based staffing over forced rotation.

Why volunteers work better:

Some engineers genuinely prefer holiday shifts. They might not observe the particular holiday, have fewer family obligations, appreciate the quieter workload, or value the premium compensation. Forcing rotation distributes burden to people who bear high personal cost while bypassing those who would willingly participate.

Implementing volunteer systems:

1. Announce holiday coverage needs 60-90 days in advance
2. Offer clear compensation package (bonus, time-off, or both)
3. Accept volunteers first, track who participates over time
4. Only use forced rotation if volunteers don’t cover all needed slots
5. Ensure volunteer burden doesn’t fall on the same individuals repeatedly

The Human-Centered On-Call Design guide covers broader principles of building systems that respect individual circumstances.

Plan Coverage Swaps Early

Engineers who would otherwise be unavailable often become available through advance coordination.

Swap scenarios:

• Engineer A doesn’t observe Thanksgiving but values Christmas time off
• Engineer B has no Christmas plans but wants New Year’s Eve free
• Engineer C prefers holiday premium pay over holiday time off
• Engineer D is traveling for one holiday but home for another

Advance visibility into holiday schedules enables beneficial trades that wouldn’t emerge without explicit coordination time.

Exclude Major Holidays from Automatic Rotation

Configure on-call systems to exclude major holidays from automated rotation entirely. This forces explicit planning rather than silently assigning coverage to whoever falls next in rotation sequence.

What exclusion creates:

• Visible coverage gaps that require active planning
• Opportunity to build volunteer pools before gaps exist
• Protection against accidental holiday assignment
• Clear documentation of holiday coverage decisions

Automatic rotation through holidays creates invisible burden. Exclusion creates visible gaps that demand attention.

Minimum Coverage Models

When holiday coverage is necessary, reducing scope minimizes burden while maintaining essential protection.

Skeleton Crew Coverage

Rather than full normal staffing, define minimum acceptable coverage for holiday periods.

Skeleton crew characteristics:

• One primary on-call instead of primary plus secondary
• Escalation to senior engineers only for genuine emergencies
• Reduced scope to critical customer-facing services only
• Extended response time expectations (30 minutes instead of 15)
• Pre-positioned automated remediation for common issues

Skeleton crew coverage provides safety net without pretending holiday operations match normal capacity.

Reduced Response SLAs

Explicitly communicate reduced holiday response expectations to stakeholders.

Holiday SLA adjustments:

• Response time extended from 15 minutes to 30-60 minutes
• Severity classification thresholds raised (more tolerance for degradation)
• Customer communication templates prepared for holiday delays
• Auto-responders set on support channels explaining holiday hours

Transparent reduced SLAs during holidays are better than implicit reduced response that surprises customers and stresses engineers trying to meet impossible expectations.

Critical-Only Alerting

Configure alerting to reduce noise during holiday periods.

Holiday alerting approach:

• Suppress warning-level alerts entirely
• Raise thresholds for paging alerts to reduce false positives
• Consolidate related alerts into single notifications
• Route non-critical alerts to Monday morning review queue

Engineers on holiday coverage should receive alerts only when genuinely necessary. Every unnecessary holiday page erodes willingness to participate in future holiday coverage.

For broader alert configuration strategies, see On-Call Alerting Strategies.

Pre-Incident Preparation

Before holidays begin, prepare for likely incidents proactively.

Preparation checklist:

• Review recent incidents for patterns likely to recur
• Verify runbooks for common issues are current and accessible
• Pre-position escalation contacts with holiday availability
• Test automated remediation for known failure modes
• Clear any degraded systems or pending maintenance
• Document current system state for context during incidents

Prepared engineers resolve holiday incidents faster, reducing time away from family activities.

Regional Holiday Coordination

Global teams face additional complexity: different regions observe different holidays at different times.

Understand Regional Holiday Variation

U.S. Thanksgiving means nothing to engineers in Germany. Diwali, Lunar New Year, and Ramadan create significant observance periods that don’t align with Western holiday calendars. Australian engineers observe different holiday dates than British engineers despite shared cultural heritage.

Regional holiday considerations:

• Federal/national holidays vary by country
• Religious holidays vary by faith tradition
• Cultural celebrations vary by ethnicity and region
• School holidays drive family vacation timing
• Summer breaks fall in opposite seasons between hemispheres

One-size-fits-all holiday policies fail global teams.

Configure Regional Holiday Calendars

Organizations with geographic distribution should configure region-specific holiday exclusions.

Regional calendar setup:

• Enable country-specific holiday calendars (U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan, etc.)
• Apply appropriate calendars to each regional roster
• Allow user-level exclusions for cultural holidays not covered by regional calendars
• Verify holiday coverage across all relevant calendars before major periods

This approach ensures no engineer is automatically scheduled during their own cultural holidays while maintaining visibility into when coverage gaps occur.

Use Cross-Region Coverage

When one region observes a holiday that others don’t, adjacent regions can extend coverage.

Cross-region coverage model:

• U.S. Thanksgiving: European and APAC teams extend hours to cover
• Christmas: Regions not observing extend hours (varies by country)
• Lunar New Year: Americas and European teams cover APAC
• Diwali: Non-observing regions provide additional coverage

This requires explicit coordination but prevents forcing any team to work their own significant holidays.

Coordinate Global Holiday Gaps

Some holidays (New Year’s, Christmas in many regions) create simultaneous gaps across multiple regions.

Global holiday strategy:

1. Identify holidays observed across multiple regions simultaneously
2. Build explicit volunteer pool from all regions
3. Provide premium compensation for global holiday coverage
4. Accept reduced coverage if volunteers are insufficient
5. Communicate coverage limitations to stakeholders

Global holidays represent maximum difficulty for coverage planning and deserve maximum advance planning attention.

For detailed exploration of multi-region coordination, see Managing On-Call Across Timezones.

Compensation and Recognition

Holiday on-call without appropriate recognition accelerates burnout and turnover.

Premium Holiday Compensation

Holiday coverage deserves compensation substantially above normal on-call rates.

Common compensation approaches:

• Double or triple time: Holiday hours paid at 2-3x normal rate
• Flat holiday bonus: Substantial bonus for each holiday covered (hundreds of dollars, not tens)
• Guaranteed time off: One or more paid days off for each holiday worked
• Combined approach: Both enhanced pay and time-off recognition

Compensation should be meaningful enough that some engineers actively want holiday shifts. If nobody wants the money, the amount is too low.

Incident-Based Holiday Bonuses

Distinguish between availability (being on-call) and work (actually responding).

Layered compensation model:

• Base holiday stipend for availability during the holiday
• Per-incident bonus for actual responses during holiday coverage
• Severity-based multipliers for complex or extended incidents
• Post-holiday recovery time for any incidents handled

An engineer who handles three incidents during Christmas dinner deserves substantially more recognition than one whose holiday passed quietly.

Non-Monetary Recognition

Some recognition can’t be reduced to money.

Other recognition approaches:

• Public acknowledgment of holiday coverage contribution
• First choice on future schedule preferences
• Priority for desired project assignments
• Team recognition in all-hands meetings
• Personal thank-you from leadership

Engineers who sacrifice family time for organizational needs should know their contribution is seen and valued.

For comprehensive coverage of compensation structures, see On-Call Compensation Models.

Communication Strategies

Clear communication reduces holiday coverage friction.

Publish Schedules Far in Advance

Holiday schedules should be published minimum 60 days before major holidays.

Advance publication enables:

• Personal travel booking without uncertainty
• Family event planning with clear availability
• Swap coordination with teammates
• Volunteer recruitment before forced assignment becomes necessary

Last-minute holiday scheduling creates unnecessary stress and reduces volunteer participation.

Set Clear Expectations

Everyone should understand holiday coverage expectations before the period begins.

Communicate explicitly:

• Who is on-call for which services during which hours
• What response time expectations apply
• How to reach escalation contacts if needed
• What authority on-call engineers have for holiday decisions
• When normal operations resume

Ambiguity during holidays creates both coverage gaps and unnecessary worry.

Prepare Stakeholder Communication

Customers and internal stakeholders should understand holiday operational expectations.

Stakeholder communication elements:

• Holiday hours and coverage limitations
• Expected response time adjustments
• Emergency contact procedures for true crises
• When normal service levels resume
• Pre-drafted incident communication templates for holiday periods

Prepared communication reduces time-to-notify during holiday incidents when engineers would rather be with family.

Tools That Support Holiday Coverage

Manual holiday scheduling creates errors and friction. Appropriate tooling automates routine coordination.

Holiday Calendar Integration

On-call platforms should integrate with holiday calendars automatically.

Holiday calendar features:

• Multiple country-specific holiday calendars (U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, India, etc.)
• Account-level selection of applicable holiday calendars
• Automatic exclusion of holidays from shift generation
• User-level marking for personal cultural holidays

Platforms like Upstat provide holiday calendar integration with coverage for major countries, enabling automatic holiday exclusions from roster generation while supporting user-specific exclusions for cultural holidays not covered by standard calendars.

Self-Service Override Systems

Engineers should arrange holiday coverage swaps without requiring manager involvement for every exchange.

Override system capabilities:

• Team member creates temporary override covering another’s dates
• Original user remains in normal rotation sequence
• Override doesn’t permanently disrupt future scheduling
• Both parties receive notification of coverage arrangement
• Managers have visibility but don’t gate routine swaps

Self-service coordination reduces friction that prevents beneficial trades.

Schedule Preview and Verification

Before publishing holiday schedules, verify coverage meets requirements.

Preview capabilities:

• View who covers which dates across holiday period
• Identify gaps where no coverage is assigned
• Confirm volunteer assignments match expectations
• Verify escalation paths are available
• Check regional coverage across timezones

Preview catches problems before they become holiday crises.

Building Sustainable Holiday Practices

Holiday coverage is annual. Sustainable practices compound over time.

Track Holiday Distribution Metrics

Monitor whether holiday burden distributes fairly across years.

Metrics to track:

• Holiday shifts per engineer per year
• Volunteer vs. forced holiday assignment ratio
• Holiday coverage by seniority level
• Incident counts during holiday coverage
• Compensation paid for holiday coverage

Data reveals hidden patterns that feel unfair even when mathematically balanced.

Gather Post-Holiday Feedback

After major holiday periods, ask participants about their experience.

Feedback questions:

• Did holiday coverage feel fair?
• Was compensation adequate for the burden?
• Were escalation resources available when needed?
• Did alerting levels feel appropriate?
• What would improve future holiday coverage?

Feedback drives incremental improvement that makes future holidays better.

Review and Adjust Annually

Before each major holiday season, review previous years and adjust strategy.

Annual review elements:

• What worked well last year?
• What problems occurred?
• Has team composition changed?
• Do compensation rates need adjustment?
• Are holiday calendar configurations current?

Continuous improvement transforms holiday coverage from annual crisis to manageable operational practice.

Final Thoughts

Holiday on-call coverage requires explicit planning, volunteer-first approaches, appropriate compensation, and tools that support coordination without administrative overhead.

Start by evaluating which holidays genuinely require coverage versus which continue out of inertia. For genuinely required coverage, build volunteer systems with meaningful incentives before defaulting to forced rotation.

Configure systems to exclude major holidays from automatic scheduling, creating visible gaps that demand explicit planning rather than invisible burden on whoever falls next in rotation. Use regional holiday calendars for global teams so no one works their own significant holidays.

The goal isn’t eliminating all holiday coverage—some services genuinely need it. The goal is maintaining necessary reliability while respecting that holidays represent irreplaceable personal time that routine scheduling practices shouldn’t quietly consume.

Engineers who feel respected during holidays remain engaged through the rest of the year. Those forced to sacrifice family time without recognition eventually find organizations that value them more.