Working Days Calculator
Count business days between two dates. Saturdays and Sundays are excluded automatically, and you can paste in your own list of public holidays or company closure days.
No business days counted yet
Choose a start and end date above. Weekends are excluded automatically, and you can paste in your own public holidays.
How to Use
- Set the start and end dates. Both are counted, so a Monday-to-Friday range gives five working days.
- Optionally paste your holidays into the text area, one per line in YYYY-MM-DD form. Lines that are not valid dates are ignored and flagged.
- Read the working-day total, plus the breakdown of total days, weekend days, and holidays that were subtracted.
- Copy the summary for a project plan, invoice, or leave request.
Features
- Inclusive counting of both the start and end dates
- Saturdays and Sundays excluded automatically
- Unlimited custom holiday list, pasted as plain text
- Holidays that already fall on a weekend are not double-counted
- Order-independent — the earlier date is detected for you
Why Business Days Are Counted Differently Everywhere
Contracts, service level agreements, notice periods, court deadlines, and shipping estimates are almost always written in business days rather than calendar days, because organisations do not work at weekends. But "business day" has no universal definition. The Monday-to-Friday week that this tool assumes covers most of Europe, the Americas, and East Asia, yet it is not universal: several Middle Eastern countries run a Sunday-to-Thursday week with Friday as the rest day, and some places use a Friday-and-Saturday weekend. If you are working to one of those calendars, count the total days here and adjust, or add the days you do not work to the holiday list.
Public holidays are the second variable, and they are the reason this tool asks you to supply the list rather than guessing. Holiday dates differ by country, by region within a country, and by employer. Many are movable — Easter shifts every year, several countries roll a holiday falling at the weekend to the following Monday, and some observances follow a lunar calendar and cannot be derived arithmetically at all. Rather than shipping a list that would be wrong for most visitors, the calculator lets you paste exactly the dates your organisation observes, including internal closure days between Christmas and New Year that no public list would include.
A detail worth knowing about the counting: a holiday that falls on a Saturday or Sunday is not subtracted twice. Weekend days are counted first, so a holiday landing at the weekend is simply already excluded and does not reduce the working-day total any further — which matches how organisations actually reckon it. The count is inclusive at both ends, so a range from Monday the first to Friday the fifth returns five. If your contract counts from the day after the start date, subtract one from the result, and check the exact wording before committing to a deadline.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are the start and end dates included in the count?
Yes, both. A range from Monday to Friday of the same week returns five working days. If your agreement excludes the first day, subtract one.
Why do I have to enter the holidays myself?
Because holiday calendars vary by country, region, and employer, and many dates move from year to year. Supplying your own list is the only way to get a number that matches your actual working calendar.
What if a holiday falls on a weekend?
It is not deducted twice. Weekend days are classified first, so a holiday on a Saturday is already outside the working-day count and the total is unaffected.
Can I use a Sunday-to-Thursday working week?
Not directly — the tool assumes a Saturday and Sunday weekend. As a workaround you can add the Fridays in your range to the holiday list, which produces the correct working-day total.
Is my holiday list stored anywhere?
No. The list lives in the page's memory in your browser and is gone when you close the tab. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no account to save it to.