Working Days Calculator
Count the working days between two dates, excluding weekends and any public holidays you add yourself. Shows business days, weekend days and full weeks.
Saturday and Sunday are selected by default. Tap to change, useful if your week runs Sunday to Thursday, or if you work a six-day week.
Optional. Enter dates as YYYY-MM-DD, separated by commas or new lines. Holidays that fall on a weekend are not double-counted.
Choose two dates, adjust the weekend if you need to, then count.
How the total splits up
Useful conversions
Quick navigation
Thirty calendar days sounds like a month of work. It is closer to twenty-one, and if a public holiday lands in the middle, nineteen. That gap of eleven days is why delivery estimates slip, why "we will get back to you within 10 days" turns into a fortnight of silence, and why project plans built on calendar arithmetic run late before any work has started.
A standard five-day week means roughly 71.4% of calendar days are working days. The exact figure for any given span depends on where the weekends fall, which is why you cannot simply multiply. A 30-day span starting on a Monday contains 22 weekdays; the same span starting on a Saturday contains 20. Two days of difference from nothing but the start day.
| Calendar span | Weekdays, best case | Weekdays, worst case |
|---|---|---|
| 7 days | 5 | 5 |
| 14 days | 10 | 10 |
| 30 days | 22 | 20 |
| 90 days | 66 | 64 |
| 365 days | 262 | 261 |
Spans that are exact multiples of seven always give the same answer; everything else depends on the start day. None of these figures deduct public holidays.
Saturday–Sunday is a convention, not a fact. A significant share of the world's offices close on different days, and if you are counting working days for a supplier, client or colleague in another country, using your own weekend will produce the wrong number.
| Weekend pattern | Where you will encounter it | Effect on a 30-day count |
|---|---|---|
| Saturday and Sunday | Most of Europe, the Americas, much of Asia and Africa | 20 to 22 working days |
| Friday and Saturday | Much of the Middle East and North Africa | 20 to 22 working days, shifted by two days |
| Friday and Sunday | Brunei, and historically elsewhere | 20 to 22, but the split week changes scheduling |
| Sunday only | Six-day working weeks, common in parts of Asia and in retail worldwide | 25 to 26 working days |
| Four-day week | A growing number of employers, usually Friday or Monday off | 16 to 18 working days |
Weekend conventions have changed within living memory in several countries, so confirm the current pattern for any span you are counting historically.
This is the reason the calculator gives you seven independent toggles rather than a "weekend" checkbox. Set the pattern that matches the office you care about, including your own, if you work a compressed or four-day week, and the count reflects reality rather than a default.
Where it works well
- Any weekend pattern, set day by day, Friday–Saturday, Sunday-only, four-day weeks, anything
- Your own holiday list, so company shutdowns and personal leave can be excluded too
- Holidays that fall on non-working days are never double-counted
- Inclusive of both endpoints, matching how project plans and delivery windows are written
- Reports the total span, working days, weekend days and excluded holidays separately so the figures can be audited
Where it falls short
- No pre-loaded public holidays, you have to supply them, which takes a minute the first time
- Half-days, shift patterns and rotas cannot be modelled
- Substitute or "bridge" days must be entered manually as the observed date
- It counts between two known dates rather than projecting forward to find one
The deliberate design decision on this page is that no public holidays are built in. It is worth explaining, because it looks like a gap.
Public holidays are not a solved dataset. They vary by country, and within countries by region, Scotland and England share a state but not a holiday calendar, and neither do individual German states or Swiss cantons or Australian territories. Some holidays are fixed to a date. Some move with the ecclesiastical calendar, which means Easter-linked holidays shift by over a month between years. Some are set by lunar observation and are only confirmed days in advance. Some are declared at short notice for a national event, a funeral, or a coronation.
A built-in list would be right for some users, silently wrong for others, and stale within a year. A blank field that you fill in is right for everyone who fills it in, and honest about what it does not know.
In practice it is also more useful. The days your office is closed are not only the statutory ones. A Christmas shutdown, a company away-day, a factory maintenance week and your own booked leave all remove working days from a span, and none of them appear on any national holiday calendar. Paste them all in and the answer describes your situation rather than a generic one.
Some periods are specified in working days precisely because the party setting them does not work weekends. Getting the unit wrong here does not just produce a wrong number, it produces a missed deadline.
Payment and settlement. Bank transfers, securities settlement and payroll cut-offs are all quoted in business days. A payment initiated on a Friday afternoon with "next business day" clearing arrives on Monday, or Tuesday if Monday is a holiday.
Statutory response windows. Many regulatory and administrative deadlines, appeal windows, information requests, notice requirements, are counted in working days specifically so that a weekend does not eat into the time available. Which days count as working varies by the rules in question.
Service level agreements. "Resolution within 3 business days" is a very different promise from three calendar days, and the difference is where most support-desk disputes originate.
Shipping and fulfilment. Carriers count transit in business days and do not move freight on public holidays. A five-business-day shipment sent the day before a long weekend arrives more than a week later.
Project and resource planning. Effort is measured in person-days, and person-days only exist on working days. A plan that allocates 40 days of effort across a 40-calendar-day window is already about twelve days short before anything goes wrong.
Leave balances. Annual leave is deducted in working days, so a fortnight off costs ten days from the balance, not fourteen, assuming no public holiday falls inside it, in which case it costs nine.
The method is simple enough to describe completely, which matters if you need to defend the number.
- Both dates you enter are included in the span, and the earlier one is used as the start regardless of which field you typed it into.
- The calculator walks the span one calendar day at a time. No division, no multiplication, no approximation.
- For each day it checks the weekday against your weekend toggles. If the day is switched off, it counts as a weekend day.
- If the day is a working day, it then checks your holiday list. A match removes it from the working total and adds it to the excluded-holidays count. Because this check runs only on days that were already working days, a holiday on a Saturday changes nothing.
- Day counting is done on UTC-normalised dates, so a daylight-saving transition inside the span cannot cause a day to be counted twice or skipped.
The result gives you four figures, total calendar days, working days, weekend days and excluded holidays. They add up: working days plus weekend days plus holidays equals the total span. If they do not add up for you, one of your holiday dates fell outside the span, and the tool will have ignored it.
For a plain calendar-day count without weekend logic, use the Date Difference Calculator. To project a date forward by a fixed period, use the Date Add & Subtract Calculator. And if you are counting the working days left before you finish for good, the Retirement Countdown does exactly that.