Hey all! I hope I have a good audience here, I could really use some help from people experienced with on-call rotation in Germany. Short background: We have a set up with level 1 support (ops people following runbooks) and level 2 support (developers - escalation contact). Level 1 is 24/7 support and their contract already includes point about on-call with the compensation plan. We still didn't figure out what to do with Level 2. So, the question is are there any Germany specific things we need to keep in mind? • is there requirement for the pay model (compensation for on-call shift, compensation only for hours worked on an incident, € compensation, free days compensation, etc) • how many days in a row a person can be on call? • is there a minimum wage for on call? Any recommendation, pointer, link is welcome!

This is how we do it: 7 Days on-call Tuesday 10:00am - Tuesday 10:00am. One person from the dev team and one from ops. It’s payed differently on weekdays vs weekends. Every hour we work outside of our business hours, we need to take 1.5x that time off at any point we want after our on-call shift finished but as soon as possible.

Also after 10pm and on weekends, public holidays etc the salary increases steeply

right, I forgot! public holidays count like weekends 🙃

night shifts see a compensation bonus of 20%, Saturday 20%, Sunday and public holidays 35% (this includes mandatory holiday compensation). Night shifts on public holidays thus see 55% in bonus.

Thanks for very good insights! Is the compensation (financial and/or time off) happening for just being on call (without incidents) or only when you work on the incident?

If on-call work regularly encompasses working night shifts, weekends etc I am sure it will be mandatory

Yes, that makes sense! Thank you