Business Days Calculator

What counts as a business day

A business day, also called a working day or workday, is a day on which ordinary business is open. For most Western countries that means Monday to Friday, minus public holidays. This calculator treats Saturday and Sunday as the weekend in every case and, if you ask for it, also treats the national holidays of the country you pick as days off.

Contracts, shipping estimates, payment terms and statutory notice periods are often written in business days, which makes the count differ from the number of calendar days. As a rough guide a month has about 21 or 22 business days and a year about 250.

It is not meant for places where the weekend falls on Friday and Saturday, or where only one day a week is off.

Counting business days between two dates

1. Leave Calculator mode on Count business days.
2. Enter a start date and an end date.
3. Choose whether to include the last day.
4. Under Days off are, pick Weekends only, or Weekends & Official holidays and then a country.
5. Press Calculate.

The results are the number of business days, the number of calendar days in the span, the Saturdays and Sundays, and (when holidays are on) the official holidays that fall on weekdays. The four numbers always add up: calendar days = business days + weekend days + holidays.

Example. From Monday 19 October 2026 to Monday 26 October 2026 with the last day included there are 8 calendar days, 2 of them weekend days (24 and 25 October), so 6 business days. Counting the whole last quarter of 2026 (1 October to 31 December) with US holidays gives 92 calendar days, 26 weekend days and 4 federal holidays (Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day), leaving 62 business days.

With Include last day set to Yes, the end date is counted only if it is itself a business day. A span from Monday 19 to Saturday 24 October reports 6 calendar days, of which 5 are business days and 1 is a weekend day; a span that ends on a public holiday adds that day to the holiday figure instead. Dates typed in reverse order are read the same way, counting back from the start date you entered.

Adding or subtracting business days

Switch to Add business days when you know how many working days you have and want the resulting date, for example a delivery promised in 10 business days. The start day itself is not counted: the first day that counts is the next business day. A negative number steps backwards, and a fractional amount is cut to a whole number (2.5 becomes 2).

The last row shows holidays at work: 30 weekdays from 19 October would end on 30 November, but Veterans Day (11 November) and Thanksgiving (26 November) are skipped, which pushes the answer out by two business days to Wednesday 2 December.

Which holidays are built in

When you choose Weekends & Official holidays, the calculator excludes the national holidays below. Holiday data is built in for the years 2020 to 2032; outside that window only weekends are skipped. A holiday that falls on a weekend is not counted twice.

• United States: the federal holidays: New Year's Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Juneteenth (from 2021), Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. A Saturday holiday is observed on the Friday before and a Sunday holiday on the Monday after.
• United Kingdom: New Year's Day, Good Friday, the early May bank holiday, the spring bank holiday, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, moved to the next weekday when they fall on a weekend. Easter Monday and the late-summer bank holiday are not in this list.
• Canada: New Year's Day, Good Friday, Victoria Day, Canada Day, Labour Day, 30 September (National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, from 2021), Christmas Day and Boxing Day, on their own dates with no weekend substitutes.
• Australia: New Year's Day, Australia Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Anzac Day, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, on their own dates with no weekend substitutes.

State, provincial and regional holidays, religious days and your employer's own closures are not included. If they apply, subtract them from the result by hand.

Business days in 2026 (United States)

A quick reference for planning. Weekdays are Monday to Friday, and the holiday column counts the federal holidays from the table above that land on those days.

Tips and common mistakes

• Inclusive or exclusive? Decide whether the start and end days count. A deadline "within 5 business days of receipt" usually starts counting the next day, which is how Add mode works.
• Check the holiday list. The result is only as right as the calendar behind it. For a regional holiday or a company shutdown, adjust by hand.
• Half days and time of day. A submission after the cut-off time may be treated as arriving on the next business day. The calculator works in whole days only.
• Contract wording. Some agreements define business days differently, for instance by banking days or by the recipient's country. Use the contract's definition when it differs.

For hours rather than days see the time card calculator, for adding hours and minutes the time calculator and add hours calculator, and for the plain number of days between dates the days between dates calculator.