Business Days Calculator

Count the working days between two dates, or find the date a number of working days away — with the public holidays of your country and your own working week.

Working days, and the three assumptions that make two calculators disagree

Two business day calculators given the same pair of dates will often return different numbers, and neither is broken. They disagree because counting working days needs three decisions that nobody writes down: whether the first day counts, which days of the week are working days, and whose public holidays apply. This page makes all three visible and lets you change them.

How the count works

The rule is simple enough to check by hand:

walk the calendar one day at a time from the start date to the end date, both included;
drop every day whose weekday is not ticked as a working day;
drop every day that is a public holiday in the selected country;
drop every date you listed as an extra day off;
what remains is the number of working days.

Worked example, United States, Monday 22 December 2025 to Friday 2 January 2026. That is 12 calendar days, of which two are weekend days: Saturday 27 and Sunday 28 December. Christmas Day falls on Thursday 25 December and New Year's Day on Thursday 1 January — both of them working weekdays, so both come out of the count. Twelve days, minus two weekend days, minus two holidays: 8 working days, where a plain weekday count would say 10.

The three assumptions

Does the first day count? "Five working days from Monday" almost always means Saturday is not day one and Monday is not day one either — you start counting from Tuesday. But a leave request from Monday to Friday is five days, not four, because both ends count. Neither convention is wrong; using the wrong one is. The main figure here counts both dates, and the tile marked excluding the start date gives you the other reading without a second calculation.

Which days are working days? Monday to Friday is a local habit, not a law of nature. The working week runs Sunday to Thursday in Egypt and Kuwait, Saturday to Wednesday in Iran, and Sunday to Thursday in Israel. Plenty of shift, retail and manufacturing calendars are not five days either. The seven checkboxes are the actual input to the calculation; the default comes from the language of this page when your browser exposes that data, and from Monday–Friday when it does not.

Whose holidays? A public holiday is a jurisdiction, not a country. The lists here are deliberately the national ones only: German Länder add Corpus Christi and All Saints in some states and not others, Spanish comunidades add their own, Australian states move and add days, and every one of those variations would be invented data if it appeared under a single country entry. Where a national list is all we can state honestly, that is what is offered — and the holidays that were actually skipped are listed beside the result so you can check them against your own calendar.

Substitute days, and why the original date stays

When a public holiday falls at the weekend, most countries grant a day off in lieu — and they do it differently. United States federal rules move a Saturday holiday back to the Friday and a Sunday holiday forward to the Monday. The United Kingdom and Canada push forward to the next free weekday, which is why Christmas Day on a Saturday and Boxing Day on a Sunday produce two substitute days, Monday and Tuesday, rather than both landing on the same Monday. Japan grants a substitute only when the holiday falls on a Sunday, and additionally turns a weekday caught between two holidays into a holiday of its own.

This calculator keeps both dates: the original holiday and its substitute. Under a Saturday–Sunday week that changes nothing, because the original was already a non-working day. If you tick Saturday as a working day, it matters — 25 December is still a holiday, and a calculator that simply moves the date would have you working on Christmas.

Where the dates come from

Fixed dates are fixed. The rest are computed, not stored in a table that goes stale:

Easter is derived with the Gregorian algorithm, which drives Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension and Whit Monday across the European lists;
"the third Monday in January", "the last Monday in May", "the Monday before 25 May" are computed from the weekday of the first or last day of the month;
the two Japanese equinox holidays follow the astronomical approximation used for the official calendar, which is accurate between 1980 and 2099 and may be a day out beyond that.

FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

Why does another calculator give me one day more?

Almost always the start date. A tool that counts "days between" is measuring an interval and naturally excludes the first day; a tool built for leave requests counts both ends because a Monday-to-Friday absence is five days off work. Compare the main figure here with the excluding the start date tile — one of the two will match the number you were given, and then you know which convention the other tool uses.

Is 2 business days the same as 48 hours?

No, and the difference is the point of the phrase. Two business days from Thursday afternoon is Monday, roughly 96 hours later; from Monday afternoon it is Wednesday, roughly 48. Contracts, bank transfers and statutory notice periods are written in business days precisely so that weekends and holidays do not eat the deadline. Read "within 2 business days" as "on the second working day after this one", not as a duration.

Do the holiday lists include regional and local holidays?

No, and that is deliberate. Only holidays that apply nationwide are included. A German list with Corpus Christi in it would be wrong for Berlin; a Spanish one with Sant Jordi would be wrong outside Catalonia. Add your own regional days in the extra days off box — they are treated exactly like public holidays, and they show up in the count as your own closures so the two never get confused.

Why are India, China and the Gulf states not in the list?

Because their calendars cannot be computed from a fixed rule the way Easter or "the third Monday in January" can. Islamic holidays follow a lunar calendar whose dates are confirmed by moon sighting and vary by country, Chinese New Year follows a lunisolar calendar, and Indian public holidays are set state by state and partly announced year by year. Publishing a guess with a confident-looking date on it would be worse than the omission. Set your working week manually and add the dates you need.

How far into the future are these dates reliable?

The rules are, the politics are not. Nothing stops a government from adding a one-off holiday — the United Kingdom did it for coronations and jubilees, and Japan moved Marine Day, Mountain Day and Sports Day in 2020 and 2021 for the Olympics. Those one-off changes are not modelled here. Within a year or two the results are solid; a decade out, treat the count as planning, not as a commitment.

Does the calculation happen on your servers?

No. The holiday rules and the whole calculation run in your browser, and neither your dates nor your list of company shutdown days is sent anywhere. That is worth knowing if the dates you are typing are an unannounced closure or an employee's leave.