A duty roster in Slack: who is on duty, posted on schedule

A duty roster is two things: a list of people in order (the rotation) and a schedule that says when the duty passes to the next person. On paper it is a table on the wall. In a team that lives in Slack it works best as a message in the right channel, at the right time, naming the person on duty, so nobody has to go and look it up.

Add to Slack Free for one rotation. Pro is $9/month per workspace.

Try this schedule in the generator: 6 people, kitchen duty changing hands each month for a year, as a table, Slack text and calendar file. Free, no sign-up.

Duties teams run as a roster

Engineering: on call, release captain, code reviewer of the week, dependency updates, bug triage
Support and IT: support desk, first responder in a customer channel, help-desk triage
Meetings: standup host, retro facilitator, note-taker
Office: kitchen, plants, mail, opening and closing, fire warden of the week

Three ways to keep a duty roster in Slack

Way	What you get	What it lacks
A spreadsheet or calendar, linked in the channel	Full control, free	Nobody is mentioned in Slack; someone has to post the name by hand each week, and swaps get lost.
Slack Workflow Builder on a schedule	A message posted every week at a set time	When we read Slack's workflow guide on 1 November 2026 we found no step that remembers whose turn it was, so the message cannot name the next person by itself. Details: Workflow Builder rotation and its workarounds.
A rotation app (Dutyroll and others)	The roster and the schedule in one place; the post names who is on duty and who is next	Another app to install; paid tiers above the free plan. See rotation apps compared.

Your duty roster with Dutyroll

Dutyroll keeps the order of people, moves the duty on at the time you choose, and posts it in the channel:

Kitchen duty this week: @noa. Next: @ben.
[Skip] [Swap with next]

Weekly (one day, e.g. Monday 09:00), every weekday (Mon-Fri), every 2 weeks or monthly (e.g. the 1st, or the last Friday), in your Slack time zone.
Skip when someone is away: the duty passes to the next person and they stay on the roster.
Swap with next when two people trade weeks.
/dutyroll who lists who is on duty in every roster at once; the app's Home tab shows each one with Post now, Edit, Pause and Delete.

Set it up in two minutes

Add Dutyroll to Slack (the workspace admin may need to approve it).
In the channel where the hand-over should appear, type /dutyroll new.
Fill in the form: the duty's name, the people in order, the channel, weekly (pick the day), every weekday, every 2 weeks or monthly (pick the day of the month or the last Friday, say), and the time. The time is in your Slack time zone.
Dutyroll posts an announcement now, and the hand-over at the time you chose: who is on duty and who is next, with Skip and Swap with next buttons.

What Dutyroll does not do

It does not page or call anyone and has no escalation; it posts a message in a channel. If you need phone or SMS alerts, use a paging tool and keep Dutyroll (or not) for the visible weekly hand-over.
It does not sync with PagerDuty, Opsgenie or calendars, and does not update a Slack user group (@oncall) yet.
Cadences are weekly (one day), every weekday (Mon-Fri), every 2 weeks or monthly (a day of the month, or the last Friday, say, of it). No custom shift lengths. Away dates are entered in Dutyroll (Mark away, and the hand-over skips that person); there is no calendar or HR-tool sync.
It is new (October 2026) and not yet in the Slack Marketplace; you install it from this site.

Price

Free for one roster with any number of people. Pro is a flat $9/month per workspace for unlimited rosters (kitchen, support desk, on call...), never per user.

Free tool: Rotation schedule generator: type the names, pick weekly, weekdays, every 2 weeks or monthly, and get the schedule as a table, Slack text, a calendar file (.ics) or CSV.