Free employee availability form template
Building a schedule before you know who can actually work is how you end up rewriting it three times. This one-page form collects each employee’s real availability up front — days, time windows, and the constraints they’re afraid to mention — so the schedule you build the first time is the one that sticks.
Download free templateExcel (.xlsx) · printable · opens in Excel & Google Sheets · No signup required
What’s inside
Header fields for employee name, role, and the week the availability applies to
A 7-day grid: available yes/no, earliest start, and latest end for each day
A notes column for per-day preferences (e.g. “prefer closing shifts”)
A free-text section for time-off requests and hard constraints (classes, a second job)
How to use this template
Download the form
Open the .xlsx in Excel or Google Sheets, or just print it — it’s designed to work on paper too.
Hand it to each employee
Give one copy per person. Ask them to fill in their name, role, and the week it applies to.
Collect day-by-day availability
For each day, the employee marks whether they’re available and their earliest start / latest end time.
Capture hard constraints
Have them note time-off requests and anything fixed — classes, a second job, standing commitments — in the constraints box.
Build around it
Use the completed forms as your source of truth when you schedule — or collect availability digitally in EpicShifts, where employees set it once and it’s enforced automatically as you build.
When to use it
This form is for any manager who schedules a team with changing availability — students, parents, second-jobbers — which describes most restaurant and retail staff. Collecting availability on paper or in a shared sheet works, but it goes stale the moment someone’s schedule changes and you have to chase the updates. When keeping availability current becomes the bottleneck, that’s the point to let employees maintain it themselves in software.
Skip the spreadsheet
Already filled it in? Upload the file to EpicShifts and we’ll import it into a live schedule — your team sees their shifts on mobile, swaps and picks up open shifts, and gets reminders automatically.
Frequently asked questions
What should an employee availability form include?
At minimum: the employee’s name and role, the week or date range it applies to, which days they can work, their earliest start and latest end time per day, and a place to note time-off requests or fixed constraints. This template covers all of those.
Can I print this availability form?
Yes. The form is laid out to print cleanly on a single page, so you can hand out paper copies — or fill it in digitally in Excel or Google Sheets, whichever your team prefers.
Is there a faster way to collect availability than a form?
Yes — in EpicShifts each employee sets their own availability once in the app, and it’s automatically respected when you build the schedule, so you’re never chasing updated paper forms or rebuilding around a conflict you didn’t know about.
Dustin Hanke, Founder, EpicShifts — Dustin builds EpicShifts and writes about scheduling, labor cost, and shift-work operations for restaurants and other hourly teams.
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