How to calculate turnaround
Turnaround is rest. Where the clock starts, where travel sits, and how a long night gets written.
Checked against sources
Turnaround is the gap between the end of one working day and the start of the next. It exists so people sleep, and the answer you usually want is a single time: the earliest you can call somebody without a penalty.
The arithmetic is simple. What makes it easy to get wrong is everything around it — where the clock actually starts, whether the drive counts, and how a time past midnight gets written down.
Where travel sits
Outside the rest period, at both ends. Travel out comes first, because rest cannot start until the performer is actually home. Travel in comes after, because they still have to get to tomorrow’s location.
The two are separate numbers, and they often differ — a new location tomorrow is a different drive. Leave both blank and the rest period simply runs from wrap.
Where travel sits relative to the rest is an operational reading: the clause measures end of day to next call without spelling travel out. Putting travel outside the rest is the conservative interpretation, and worth confirming with production.
Crossing midnight, and how the time is written
Most turnarounds do, and there are no dates involved. Military time rolls forward on its own.
A shooting day that runs past midnight keeps counting rather than resetting. A 1:30am wrap is written 2530, because it is still that day’s work. Type it that way and the tool reads it that way.
A straightforward one
Wrap 2130
Turnaround 10 hr
Earliest call 0730
A long night
Wrap 2530 — half one in the morning
Turnaround 10 hr
Earliest call 1130
Tomorrow’s call resets to ordinary time. Nobody writes a call sheet as 2900.
The three lengths
Ten hours is the crew standard — BCCFU A1.20(a)(i).
Eleven is UBCP/ACTRA performers, under Article A1301 as amended by the 2025–2028 Memorandum of Agreement. It is also the BCCFU figure in defined circumstances: after sixteen hours of work in the first year of a television series, and after turnaround is encroached by two or more hours on two consecutive days.
Twelve is the rest period for minors under UBCP/ACTRA, measured from the minor’s time of dismissal rather than from cast wrap. It is also the figure given for SAG-AFTRA — though that agreement is not held here, so it carries no citation.
Those are a shortcut for picking a number quickly, not a determination of what applies to you. Each carries conditions the tool cannot see — how long the day ran, what happened yesterday, whose contract it is.
What no dates costs you
One thing, twice a year. Without a date the tool cannot know whether the rest period spans a daylight saving change, so it does not claim to. On those two nights the clock answer and the real-elapsed answer differ by an hour.
That is a deliberate trade. Every other day of the year, not having to enter a date is worth more than the two nights it costs — and on those two nights, you already know.
What this tool does not do
One performer, one answer. For a whole cast — mixed agreements, HMU wrap, prep time and set-ready — use the Cast Turnaround Clock instead. This one is deliberately the quick answer you want standing at the truck.
It does not know the exceptions either — the provisions that change turnaround for a sixth day, a distant location, or a company move. BCCFU provides a continuous thirty-four hour rest period after six consecutive days, for instance. Those live in the agreement, and the agreement governs.
One thing worth knowing if you are working outside a studio zone: at least one BC agreement computes turnaround from the zone boundary rather than from the location. That connects turnaround to the zone work, and this calculator does not handle it yet.