Business Days Calculator
Count business workdays, compute final target dates, and isolate custom weekends or regional holidays.
Select Date Boundaries
Weekend & Holiday Preferences
Counting & Offset Rules for Business Days
Standard business day counts reflect the total working days of an organization, usually Monday through Friday, excluding weekends. Using this calculator, you can customize weekends to match regional norms (such as Friday-Saturday weekends in the Middle East).
This client-side tool also calculates major floating and fixed federal bank holidays for the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Easter calculations are derived using the Meeus/Jones/Butcher Gregorian Easter Algorithm.
Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated
What this tool is used for
- Counting working days between two dates for a delivery estimate.
- Working out a deadline expressed in business days.
- Checking a notice period stated in working days.
- Counting working days remaining in a month.
- Confirming a working-day count a supplier or a contract quoted.
How it works in practice
A worked example
A reporter's federal FOIA request reached the agency on Monday 2 November 2026, and she wants the date the agency's twenty-working-day deadline to respond runs out.
Tab Add / Subtract Days Start Date 2026-11-02 Business Days to Add/Sub 20 Include Start Date in count unticked Select Weekend Days Sat, Sun Exclude Regional Holidays United States Federal Holidays
CALCULATED DATE TARGET Projected Target Date Wednesday, December 2, 2026 WEEKENDS SKIPPED 8 days HOLIDAYS SKIPPED 2 days Elapsed Calendar Days: 30 days
Twenty working days became thirty calendar days. The statute counts twenty days after the receipt, so the start box is unticked and the count begins on Tuesday 3 November; from there it steps over eight weekend days and two federal holidays, Veterans Day on Wednesday 11 November and Thanksgiving on Thursday 26 November, and lands on Wednesday 2 December. Leave the box ticked, as it is by default, and the day of receipt becomes day one, so the same twenty days end on Tuesday 1 December, a day before the clock actually runs out.
The edge case that catches people
Each holiday rule carries the years it applied, taken from the statutes behind 5 U.S.C. 6103, so a historical count uses the calendar of its own year. Counted the same way, a request received on Monday 1 June 2020 comes out due on Monday 29 June, because Juneteenth only became a federal holiday in 2021. Holidays that moved land where they fell at the time: a range in the autumn of 1975 skips Monday 27 October, when Veterans Day was the fourth Monday of October, and Thanksgiving 1939 is Thursday 23 November, the date Roosevelt proclaimed, not the last Thursday of the month. So the question a historical count usually exists to answer, whether a past reply was late, gets that year's answer rather than today's.
When not to use this tool
Its United States list is the federal calendar and nothing more. State holidays such as Patriots' Day in Massachusetts or Cesar Chavez Day in California are absent, and so is anything your own organisation closes for, from the Friday after Thanksgiving to an extra day granted by executive order. It also counts whole dates rather than hours, so a deadline that lapses at 5 pm in the agency's time zone, or a service commitment measured in business hours, is beyond it. For a contract or a court filing, the governing rule defines what a day is and what happens when the last one falls on a closure; read that rule first and use the count as a cross-check rather than the answer.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Are weekends always Saturday and Sunday?
- Not everywhere, which is why they are selectable. Much of the Middle East runs a Friday–Saturday weekend; Israel uses Friday–Saturday; Nepal has a single-day Saturday weekend. Contract deadlines counted in business days follow local practice, so the default two-day assumption can quietly shift a date.
- How is Easter calculated?
- With the Meeus/Jones/Butcher algorithm for the Gregorian calendar — a closed-form computation that needs no lookup table. Easter anchors several bank holidays, so Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension and Whit Monday all move with it, which is why those dates differ by up to a month year to year.
- Does it apply observed holidays?
- No, and this is the main caveat. US federal holidays falling on a Saturday are observed the preceding Friday and Sunday ones the following Monday — Independence Day 2026 lands on a Saturday, for instance. Here the holiday is only counted on its actual date, so an observed weekday still counts as a working day.
- Does the start date count as day one?
- It does by default, and the checkbox turns that off. The distinction is exactly the ambiguity in "within 5 business days": counted inclusively that is four days later, exclusively it is five. Legal and shipping deadlines usually exclude the start day, so check the wording before trusting either number.
- Why are the holiday lists only approximate?
- Because public holidays are set nationally and often regionally — German states differ, UK nations differ, and the EU has no common statutory set at all. The lists here cover the widely-observed dates for each region; anything company-specific or state-specific has to be handled by hand.
Common errors and gotchas
- Ignoring public holidays, which a weekday count cannot know about.
- Assuming Monday to Friday everywhere, when working weeks differ by country.
- Assuming a five-day week, when some regions and contracts count six.
- Using calendar days when the contract says business days, or the reverse.
- Overlooking that a holiday falling at a weekend may be observed on a weekday.