Working Days
Business days between two dates
Weekend-free day counting, with a box for the days your organisation actually closes. Paste your holiday dates one per line in YYYY-MM-DD form and they come out of the total alongside the Saturdays and Sundays, which is the difference between a business-day count and a business-day count you can hand to a client.
Both endpoints are included. A range from Monday to the following Monday is six working days, not five — the tool walks every date from start to end and classifies each one, rather than measuring a gap. That is the convention project plans and delivery windows use, and it is the opposite of the Date Difference Calculator, which reports elapsed days.
Four numbers come back: working days, calendar days, weekend days, and how many of your pasted holidays were actually applied. The last one is a check figure, and it catches more mistakes than the first one.
The four rows, and why the holiday count is the one to read first
- Working Days — dates in range that are neither Saturday, nor Sunday, nor on your holiday list.
- Calendar Days — every date in range, inclusive of both ends.
- Weekends — Saturdays and Sundays in range.
- Holidays Excluded — how many lines from your holiday box actually removed a day.
That last figure is a reconciliation, not a result. Paste eleven holiday dates and see nine, and two of your lines did nothing: either they fell outside the date range, or they landed on a weekend that was already excluded, or the format was wrong. Any of the three is worth knowing before you quote the schedule. The three buckets are mutually exclusive and always sum to the calendar-day figure, so working + weekends + holidays = calendar days is a check you can run by eye.
Saturday and Sunday is an assumption, not a fact
The weekend test is hard-coded to Saturday and Sunday, and for a large part of the world that is simply wrong. Saudi Arabia shifted its official weekend from Thursday–Friday to Friday–Saturday in 2013. The United Arab Emirates moved the other way in January 2022, adopting a Saturday–Sunday weekend with a half-day Friday for the federal sector. Israel's weekend is Friday–Saturday. If you are scheduling against one of those calendars, count calendar days with the Date Difference Calculator and apply your own weekend rule.
Holidays that fall on a weekend do nothing. The weekend check runs before the holiday check, so a date on your list that lands on a Saturday is counted as a weekend day and your holiday count does not move. This is usually correct, because most jurisdictions shift the observance: in the United States a federal holiday on a Saturday is observed the preceding Friday and one on a Sunday the following Monday. List the observed date, not the nominal one.
The format is strict. One ISO date per line, 2026-12-25. "Dec 25 2026", "25/12/2026" and a trailing comma will all be ignored silently — which is exactly what the Holidays Excluded row is there to reveal.
Whole days only. Christmas Eve closes at noon in a lot of offices, and a four-day compressed week is five weekdays with one of them unstaffed. Neither is expressible here; adjust the result by hand.
How the count is built
The calculator steps through the range one date at a time, from the start date to the end date inclusive, and drops each date into exactly one of three buckets:
- Is it a Saturday or a Sunday? Weekend bucket, and stop.
- Otherwise, does it appear in the holiday list? Holiday bucket, and stop.
- Otherwise, working day.
Walking every date rather than using a "weeks × 5 plus remainder" shortcut is slower and much harder to get wrong. The shortcut needs special cases for ranges that start mid-week, end mid-week, or do both, and it is where most hand-rolled business-day functions acquire their off-by-one bug. Leap days need no special handling either: 29 February is simply another date to classify. The calendar-days figure is computed separately as the elapsed difference plus one, which is what makes both endpoints count.
Worked example: June 2026, with and without a holiday
June 2026 begins on a Monday and ends on a Tuesday, which is close to the best case for a calendar month. Enter 2026-06-01 to 2026-06-30:
- Calendar Days: 30
- Weekends: 8 — four Saturdays and four Sundays
- Working Days: 22
Now paste 2026-06-19 into the holiday box. Juneteenth falls on a Friday in 2026, so it is a real weekday removal: Holidays Excluded reads 1 and working days drops to 21. Paste 2026-07-04 as well and nothing changes — Independence Day 2026 falls on a Saturday, so it is already in the weekend bucket and it is outside the range besides. The federal observance that year is Friday 3 July, and that is the date a US calendar should actually list.
Weekdays per calendar year, and why the number moves
| Year | Calendar days | Weekdays (Mon–Fri) |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 366 | 262 |
| 2025 | 365 | 261 |
| 2026 | 365 | 261 |
| 2027 | 365 | 261 |
| 2028 | 366 | 260 |
A 365-day year is 52 weeks plus one spare day, so it has 261 weekdays whenever that spare day is a weekday and 260 when it is not. A leap year adds a second spare day and can reach 262, as 2024 did by starting and ending on a Monday. This is why "about 260 working days" is a safe planning figure and any exact number quoted without a year attached is guesswork.
Holidays come off the top of that. In 2026, ten of the eleven US federal holidays fall on a weekday and Independence Day falls on a Saturday, observed on Friday 3 July — so a US federal calendar for 2026 runs 261 − 11 = 250 days before anyone takes a single day of leave.
Where the business-day figure is the contractual one
Service level agreements, statutory response windows, notice periods and delivery guarantees are usually written in business days precisely because weekends are not staffed. "Within ten business days" spanning a Thanksgiving week is fourteen or fifteen calendar days, and the difference is where disputes come from. Paste the holidays that your counterparty's calendar recognises, not yours.
Payroll and billing are the other regular use. A biweekly period is always ten working days, but a semi-monthly one is not: the first half of a month can hold anywhere from nine to twelve, which is why hourly semi-monthly payroll needs the range counted rather than assumed. Freelancers quoting a day rate hit the same problem in reverse.
If you are using this to sanity-check PTO or a capacity plan, How Many Working Days Are Really in a Year? works through why the usable figure lands well under 250. To label the resulting schedule in week numbers, use the Week Number Calculator.
Frequently asked questions
Are both the start and end dates counted?
Yes. The tool classifies every date from the start to the end inclusive, so a single weekday entered as both start and end counts as one working day. That is the opposite of the Date Difference Calculator, which reports elapsed days.
What format do holiday dates need to be in?
ISO dates, one per line, like 2026-12-25. Anything else is ignored without an error, so check the Holidays Excluded row to confirm your list was applied.
I listed a holiday and the working-day count did not change. Why?
Either it fell outside your date range, or it fell on a Saturday or Sunday and was already excluded as a weekend, or the format did not parse. In the US, list the observed weekday rather than the nominal date — a Saturday holiday is observed on the Friday before.
Why is there no built-in holiday calendar?
Because there is no such thing as the holiday calendar. US federal holidays are not the same as any given state's, banks close on days schools do not, and a global team observes several sets at once. A wrong built-in list is worse than an empty box.
Can I count a Friday–Saturday or four-day weekend?
Not directly — Saturday and Sunday are hard-coded. Count calendar days with the Date Difference Calculator and apply your own weekend rule, or list the extra non-working weekdays in the holiday box.
How many working days are in a typical year?
Between 260 and 262 weekdays, depending on which day the year starts on and whether it is a leap year. Subtract your holidays — eleven for a US federal calendar — and the figure lands near 250 before any leave.