On the oil and gas fields of the Atyrau region, a two-week shift has long become an ordinary rhythm of life. People fly hundreds of kilometres from home, live in a rotation camp, work to a schedule and return once the shift is over. Rotational work in Kazakhstan looks perfectly clear to everyone right up until the payslip lands. That is when it turns out the worker expected one figure and the accounting department calculated something entirely different. The dispute almost always comes down to a single question: how to count the hours worked correctly under the Labour Code, and how rotation pay differs from an ordinary nine-to-five back in the city.
The price of a mistake here is noticeably higher than in an office. Miscounted hours lead to underpaid overtime, a conflict at dismissal and, soon after, a labour inspection and a fine. Recruiting staff for oil and gas projects, at FSSA we keep seeing the same pattern: a properly drafted employment contract and an honest, transparent rotation schedule remove half of the future claims before the first shift even begins. So it is worth working through, step by step, what the law requires of the employer and what the rotation worker is entitled to expect.
The first thing to understand is that a rotation is not, in legal terms, simply "work somewhere far away". Article 135 of the Labour Code describes it as a special form of organising labour outside the workers' permanent place of residence, applied when their daily return home cannot be ensured. The classic examples are oil and gas extraction, construction in remote areas and work on seagoing vessels. An employer who chooses this regime automatically takes on obligations that an ordinary city company does not have. It must provide workers with housing at the site — those very rotation camps, organise meals, transport people from the assembly point to the workplace and back, and create proper conditions for rest between shifts. These are not corporate perks or a gesture of goodwill but a direct requirement of the law. And these costs cannot be shifted onto the worker's wages by deducting them from what has been earned. In practice this means the cost of a bed in the rotation camp and a hot meal in the canteen is the company's concern, not a deduction from the advance — an attempt to attach these sums to the payslip is a direct violation that inspectors notice among the first.
There are also categories of people who cannot be assigned to a rotation at all. Clause 3 of the same Article 135 bars workers under eighteen, pregnant women twelve or more weeks along, first-group persons with disabilities, and anyone whose medical certificate carries a note that rotation work is contraindicated on health grounds. In practice employers often err precisely here: they send a person to the site without confirming the results of the medical examination and end up with a problem that is almost impossible to close after the fact.
To grasp the scale, it helps to picture a typical schedule. A welder flies in to a site near Atyrau or in Mangystau, works fifteen days straight at eleven or twelve hours a shift, then flies home for the same stretch. Across a calendar "month" he spends only half his time on the rig, but those days are compressed into dense shifts with no weekends in the usual sense. Hence the whole specificity of the regime: ordinary weekly norms simply do not fit such a rhythm, and the law is forced to count working time differently.
How long a rotation lasts and how working time is counted
The law limits the length of the rotation itself strictly. Under clause 4 of Article 135 it cannot exceed fifteen calendar days. This term can be extended to thirty days, but only with the worker's written consent — a verbal "stay another week" has no legal force. The rotation is always followed by an inter-rotation rest period, and it too is regulated: if the rotation lasted thirty days, the inter-rotation rest must also run for the next thirty. A separate exception is made for seagoing vessel workers — with written consent they may stay on rotation for up to one hundred and twenty calendar days.
Inter-rotation rest is not a formality or "idle time". It exists so the person can recover: fatigue accumulated on the rig is directly linked to injury rates, and shortened rest strikes at the safety of the whole shift. That is why inspectors watch compliance with the inter-rotation period as closely as the correctness of pay, while experienced employers plan schedules with a buffer rather than up against the limits.
Then comes the part least obvious to newcomers — the summarised recording of working time. In ordinary jobs the norm is counted by the week: forty hours, and everything is clear. On a rotation that is impossible, because shifts run back to back at twelve hours each and are then followed by a long break. So Article 75 of the Labour Code allows working time to be aggregated over a longer stretch — the accounting period. It may be a quarter, half a year or any other calendar span, but no more than one calendar year. The procedure for such accounting and the list of categories it applies to are fixed in a collective agreement or an employer's act — that is, it does not happen "by itself" but is a decision that must be documented.
What matters is exactly what the law includes in the accounting period. It is not only the time of direct work at the site but also rest time and travel time from the employer's location or the assembly point to the workplace and back. At the same time the total length of working time across the whole accounting period must not exceed the norm set by the Labour Code. Let us put it in numbers. Suppose a quarter is chosen as the accounting period and the production calendar allots it, say, 512 working hours. Over three months the worker put in 560 hours to the rotation schedule. The difference of 48 hours is precisely the overtime for the period that must be paid above the ordinary rate, even if everything looked routine inside each individual rotation. Count it shift by shift and "reset the counter" after each trip, and those hours are easily lost — which is how most hidden underpayments arise, surfacing later at dismissal.
How rotational work in Kazakhstan is paid
Here lies the main source of misunderstanding. Rotational work is paid not by a "monthly salary" but for the hours actually worked to the shift schedule — this is required directly by clause 2 of Article 106 of the Labour Code. The logic is simple. First an hourly tariff rate is derived from the position salary and the monthly norm of time in the production calendar. Then the wage is calculated by a formula: the number of hours actually worked multiplied by the hourly rate. If the worker put in more than the norm across the rotation, the difference is paid as overtime.
A small example makes the picture clearer. Say the position salary is 300,000 tenge and the monthly norm under the production calendar is 160 hours. The hourly tariff rate then comes to about 1,875 tenge. If the person works above the norm across the accounting period, the base calculation still runs off the actual hours, while the hours above the norm now carry a one-and-a-half coefficient. This is how rotational work in Kazakhstan turns from an abstract "monthly wage" into transparent arithmetic that the worker can check for themselves with a calculator in hand.
Overtime on a rotation is almost always present. Under Article 109 overtime hours are paid at no less than one and a half times the hourly rate. A separate situation is when a person is called to work during the inter-rotation period, which by law is supposed to be rest. Such work is equated to work on a day off under Article 85 and is likewise paid at no less than one and a half times. Night hours and work on public holidays all carry their own uplift coefficients and are added to the base. That is why a rotation worker's payslip looks more complex than an office one: it has several layers of extra pay, and the law requires each to be shown separately.
And what about the famous rotation allowance that applicants love to ask about? Here one must be precise. Kazakhstan's Labour Code does not set a fixed percentage for such an allowance as mandatory for everyone. Additional payments for the rotation character of the work — allowances, field subsistence, compensation for a travelling nature of the job — are determined by the employer and fixed in a collective agreement, an employment contract or the employer's own act. So the allowance may well exist, and on the competitive oil and gas market it usually does, but its size is a matter of agreement and internal documents, not a line from the Code. Workers should look for it in their employment contract rather than rely on rumours that "everyone pays such-and-such". In reality, in the oil and gas segment the rotation allowance has long become part of the competition for people: companies that pay transparently and with a clear allowance fill vacancies faster and suffer less from turnover. There is also a hard floor: however the hours are counted, monthly pay for a fully worked norm cannot fall below the minimum wage, which in 2026 stands at 85,000 tenge.
Where employers get it wrong
The costliest misconception is to assume that on a rotation "we are all friends here" and formalities can be relaxed. The law thinks otherwise, and the price of carelessness is measured in monthly calculation indices. Breaching the maximum rotation length is answered for by Article 89 of the Code of Administrative Offences: a first breach usually earns the employer a warning, but a repeat one brings a fine. For officials this is forty MCI, for medium business eighty, and for large business one hundred and twenty MCI. In 2026 money, with the MCI at 4,325 tenge, one hundred and twenty indices turn into 519,000 tenge for a single episode.
Liability for money is even more sensitive. Breaching the rules on paying overtime, work on days off and public holidays, and night hours is punished under clauses 3 and 4 of Article 87 of the Code of Administrative Offences. Here the fine for officials starts at thirty MCI and reaches one hundred and twenty for large business. If the breach recurs within a year, the bar rises to one hundred and fifty MCI — nearly 649,000 tenge. And that is one type of breach; when the inspection finds them in a bundle, the sums add up.
Behind these figures sits a short list of typical mistakes that repeat from company to company. A worker is kept on site beyond fifteen days without a written consent being drawn up. The due inter-rotation rest is forgotten and people are driven to a new shift ahead of time. A "flat salary" is paid instead of an honest calculation by hours worked, thereby hiding overtime. The medical examination is not carried out or not taken into account, and people for whom rotation is contraindicated are admitted to it. Each of these lapses looks like a trifle in the moment, but it is precisely from such trifles that lost labour disputes and inspectors' orders are assembled. A rotation forgives much, except carelessness in the paperwork — and it is cheaper for the employer to build transparent accounting from day one than to prove its case later with a payslip in hand. In the end, an honestly documented rotation protects not only against inspection fines but also the reputation of a company people return to, rotation after rotation.
Frequently asked questions
Is a rotation allowance mandatory by law?
There is no fixed mandatory rotation allowance in the Labour Code. Additional payments for a rotation are set by the employer through a collective or employment contract or the employer's own act. So you need to look at your own employment contract: if the allowance is written in, it is mandatory to pay, and if it is not, you cannot demand it on the Code alone.
Is travel to and from the workplace paid?
Travel time from the assembly point or the employer's location to the site and back is included by law in the working-time accounting period. On top of that, the employer is obliged to organise the transport itself. The exact procedure for paying travel days is best fixed in advance in the contract or an act so the parties have no discrepancies.
Can a rotation be extended from 15 to 30 days?
Yes, but only with the worker's written consent. Without such a document the extension is unlawful, and it exposes the employer to liability under Article 89 of the Code of Administrative Offences. An extended rotation must also be followed by a corresponding inter-rotation rest.
How is overtime on a rotation paid?
Overtime is identified from the results of the accounting period under summarised recording, not from a single shift. Overtime hours are paid at no less than one and a half times the hourly rate. Work during the inter-rotation period is equated to work on a day off and is also paid at a minimum of one and a half times.