> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.tallwatch.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# On-call schedules

> Set up a rotation so an escalation policy can page whoever is responsible right now, and cover gaps with overrides.

An on-call schedule rotates responsibility through your team so the right person is paged at any given time. You target the schedule from an [escalation policy](/escalation-policies), and Tallwatch figures out who's on call when an incident fires.

## Create a schedule

<Steps>
  <Step title="Open the on-call page">
    Go to **On-call** and click **Create schedule**. Name it for the team or service it covers, like `Platform on-call`.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Set the timezone and rotation">
    Pick the timezone the rotation runs in, then a rotation type: **weekly**, **daily**, or **custom**. Weekly hands off once a week, daily once a day.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Set when it starts">
    Choose the start time. Tallwatch counts forward from there to work out who's on call at any moment.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Add members in order">
    Add the people in the order they should rotate. Each member is paired with the [channel](/alerts/overview) used to reach them (for example their personal Slack or email channel). The order is the rotation order.
  </Step>
</Steps>

Once saved, the schedule can be a target on any escalation policy level.

## Overrides

Plans change. An override swaps one person for another over a fixed time range without touching the rotation itself.

<Steps>
  <Step title="Open the schedule">
    Open the schedule and add an override.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Pick the substitute and window">
    Choose who's covering, and the start and end times. Add a reason if you want the team to know why (vacation, appointment, swap).
  </Step>
</Steps>

During that window, the substitute is on call. Outside it, the normal rotation resumes. The underlying rotation is never changed by an override, so a one-off swap doesn't shift everyone's turns.

## Attach it to an escalation policy

A schedule pages people only when an [escalation policy](/escalation-policies) targets it. A common setup: level one alerts the team chat, and a later level targets the on-call schedule so the current responder gets paged if chat goes unanswered.

<Note>
  There's no calendar feed (iCal) export in this release, so you can't subscribe to the rotation from an external calendar app yet.
</Note>