About the restaurant work schedule template
This free restaurant employee schedule template helps you build a weekly restaurant schedule fast—without rebuilding a spreadsheet from scratch every time. Use it to assign roles, shift times, and coverage for front and back of house, then share it with your team. If you’re still juggling paper sheets, this restaurant shift schedule template gives you a cleaner starting point. Or try a free trial of 7shifts today for even better scheduling.
How to use your restaurant schedule Excel template
Make well-executed schedules with this free Excel template.
1. Select which day of the week the schedule starts.
2. Add employees’ names.
3. Go to the ‘Shifts’ tab to customize the shift times and roles.
4. Select shift times and roles from the drop-down list for each employee.
5. Your schedule is ready to share with your team!
Or start a free trial of 7shifts for even better scheduling.
How to automate your restaurant schedules
A spreadsheet can get the job done, but it doesn’t help when the schedule changes five times in a day. If you want fewer texts, fewer version-control headaches, and clearer accountability, scheduling software like 7shifts can help by keeping schedule changes, availability, and shift swaps in one place.
“It is SO easy to use. It is intimidating at first familiarizing yourself with the platform but after a few minutes it feels so natural using it. I used to do all of my scheduling on an excel spreadsheet. It would take two or three times as long as it takes me now on 7shifts.”
Eddie Cuellar
Restaurant owner, Tower Burger
“I was originally drawn to 7shifts because of their simple and easy interface for scheduling, but when I found out they also did payroll, it was a no-brainer. My employees onboarded via the 7shifts mobile app in 10 minutes and I'm already saving hours of time when it comes to processing payroll. Total game changer.”
Fahad Hanif
Owner/Operator, Halal Guys
“If you're a restaurant professional, this is a mandate. If this is a hobby for you, by all means, use something else. Use Excel, use post-it notes if you write it down. But if you're a professional and this is your career and your actual goal is to earn profit for your business, then there's no viable solution or anything that would make sense other than this. There just isn't.”
Mike Bausch
Owner, Andolini's
Find out why 1.5 million restaurant professionals love 7shifts
Restaurant scheduling FAQs
Yes, the restaurant schedule template is completely free to download — no trial signup, no strings attached. It’s available as a Google Sheet or Excel file that you can customize with your own employee names, roles, and shift times. If you later decide you want automated scheduling, overtime alerts, or mobile access for your team, you can start a free trial of 7shifts.
With the Excel template, you can share the schedule by emailing the file, printing it out, or uploading it to a shared drive like Google Drive or Dropbox. The downside is that every time you make a change, you have to re-share the updated version — and there’s no guarantee your staff will see it. With 7shifts, schedule updates are pushed directly to your team’s phones the moment you publish, so there’s no confusion about who has the latest version.
Yes. The template includes a “Shifts” tab where you can customize shift times and roles to match your restaurant’s structure — whether that’s front of house, back of house, bar, or any other department. You can create separate shift labels for servers, line cooks, hosts, and bartenders, then assign them from a drop-down menu. For restaurants with more complex role structures or multiple locations, 7shifts lets you manage all of that in one place with role-based scheduling and location-level visibility.
Most managers can put together a basic weekly schedule in 30–60 minutes using the template, depending on how many employees they’re scheduling. That said, the time adds up — if you’re spending an hour every week on scheduling, that’s more than 50 hours a year just on building the schedule, before you factor in changes, swaps, and call-outs. Restaurant owners who switch to 7shifts report cutting their scheduling time greatly, which frees up time for the parts of the job that actually need a manager’s attention.
A weekly schedule template covers a single seven-day period and is the most common format for restaurant scheduling because it’s easier to adjust for fluctuating staff availability and sales volume. A monthly template gives you a higher-level view of the whole month, which is useful for planning around events, holidays, or known busy periods. Most restaurant operators use a weekly template for day-to-day scheduling and a monthly view for longer-term planning. 7shifts offers both views within the platform, so you can switch between them without rebuilding anything.
Quickly create your weekly schedules
