Work Days Calculator

Count business days between two dates.

How to use

Pick the start and end dates of the period you want to measure.
Choose which weekdays are weekends (Saturday and Sunday by default).
Add public holidays for your country to exclude them from the count.
See the total workdays, weekend days, and excluded holidays.
Use Add days mode to find a future business date from a start date and number of working days.

Frequently asked questions

Which holidays does the calculator know?

It includes major public holidays for several common countries as quick presets. You can also add custom dates to match your office calendar.

Does it count the start and end date?

By default both endpoints are included if they are workdays. There is a toggle to exclude the start date if you prefer the elapsed-days convention.

Can I customise which days count as weekends?

Yes. Some regions treat Friday and Saturday as the weekend; you can pick any combination of weekdays as non-working.

Does it handle partial workdays?

No. The calculator works in whole-day units. For tracking partial days, use a timesheet rather than this tool.

Business days are a local convention, not a constant

A "working day" excludes weekends and public holidays, and both vary. Most of Europe and the Americas rest Saturday-Sunday, but several Middle Eastern countries use Friday-Saturday. Public holidays diverge even more: Greece observes Orthodox Easter on a different date than Western Easter most years, and a date like 15 August (Dormition) stops Greek business while the rest of Europe works. Any deadline expressed in business days therefore means something slightly different in every jurisdiction, which is why contracts that matter define the term explicitly.

Counting conventions that change the answer

Inclusive vs exclusive endpoints: "within 10 business days of Monday the 2nd" can mean the 13th or the 16th depending on whether day one is the 2nd or the 3rd. Legal convention usually starts counting the day after.
A normal year contains about 260-262 weekdays; subtract national holidays (10-14 in most countries) for true working days.
A calendar month averages roughly 21-22 working days, the figure HR uses to convert monthly salary to a daily rate.

Project estimation in working days

Estimating in working days instead of calendar days prevents the classic December surprise, where a "two week" task crosses Christmas and silently becomes four. The reverse calculation is equally useful: from a fixed launch date, count backwards in business days to find the real last day work can start, then move it earlier, because every plan that ends exactly on the deadline was already late.

Working-day math for payroll and leave

The same counting answers HR's recurring questions. A monthly salary divided by that month's actual working days gives the true daily rate... which varies month to month, since a 23-workday March and a 19-workday December price a day's absence differently. Annual leave expressed in working days (the EU's four-week minimum is 20 working days for a five-day week) stretches further when bridged across public holidays: placing 4 days of leave around a Thursday holiday routinely buys a 9-day absence. Counting before requesting is how the long break gets cheaper. The same logic prices overtime and notice periods: a contractual one-month notice given on November 28th ends on a different real date than one given July 1st, purely because of how many working days each window contains. Whenever money or obligations are denominated in days, the first question is always which kind of day the document means.