Working Days Calculator Online Free
Count business days between any two dates. Skip weekends, exclude custom holidays, and find the exact working day count for any deadline.
Counting working days, when the weekend is not always Saturday and Sunday
Most business day calculators hardcode Saturday and Sunday as the weekend and ship a fixed list of holidays for one country. That covers maybe a third of the world’s working population. This one does neither. You choose which days are non working, you supply your own holiday dates, and the count adjusts.
Weekends are not universal
The Friday and Saturday weekend is standard across much of the Middle East. Nepal runs a single day weekend on Saturday. Brunei takes Friday and Sunday, leaving Saturday as a working day in the middle. Israel closes Friday and Saturday. Toggle whichever days apply.
| Region | Non working days | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Most of the world | Saturday, Sunday | Europe, Americas, most of Asia and Africa |
| UAE | Saturday, Sunday | Switched from Friday and Saturday in January 2022, with a half day Friday |
| Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Egypt | Friday, Saturday | Friday is the congregational prayer day |
| Israel | Friday, Saturday | Sunday is a full working day |
| Nepal | Saturday only | Six day working week |
| Brunei | Friday, Sunday | Saturday sits between two rest days |
| Afghanistan, Iran | Thursday afternoon, Friday | Varies by sector |
The counting logic
The tool iterates day by day rather than using a formula. That is slower in principle and completely irrelevant in practice, since even a decade long range is under four thousand iterations. What it buys you is correctness with arbitrary weekend patterns and arbitrary holiday lists, which a closed form formula cannot handle.
That ordering matters. If a public holiday falls on a Saturday it is counted as a weekend day, not as a separate holiday, so the three categories always sum to the calendar total. No double counting.
Endpoint inclusion, the source of most disagreements
Two people counting the same range routinely differ by one or two days. It is almost never the algorithm. It is which endpoints they counted.
- ABoth endpoints includedMonday to Friday is five working days. Standard for leave requests, hotel stays and anything where you occupy the day itself.
- BStart excluded, end includedMonday to Friday is four. Standard for notice periods and delivery lead times, where the clock starts the day after the trigger event.
- CBoth excludedThree. Used when both endpoints are events rather than working days, such as counting clear days between a filing and a hearing.
Legal deadlines frequently specify clear days, meaning both the first and last day are excluded. UK civil procedure rules use this. Check the wording before you count.
Adding holidays
Paste dates one per line in YYYY-MM-DD format. Anything that does not match that pattern is ignored, so you can keep comments or labels on other lines without breaking the parse. The tool deliberately ships no built in holiday list, because there is no correct one. Holidays vary by country, by state or province, by industry, and several move each year.
The deadline projection
Beyond counting a range, the tool projects forward: given a start date and a number of working days, which calendar date do you land on. It steps forward one day at a time and only increments the counter on a qualifying day, which means a five day turnaround starting on a Thursday correctly lands on the following Thursday rather than the following Tuesday.
Doing this in a spreadsheet
| Function | What it does |
|---|---|
| NETWORKDAYS | Counts working days between two dates. Assumes Saturday and Sunday. Both endpoints inclusive. |
| NETWORKDAYS.INTL | Same, but takes a weekend code or a seven character string of ones and zeros so you can define any weekend pattern. |
| WORKDAY | Projects forward or backward by a number of working days. |
| WORKDAY.INTL | Same projection with a custom weekend definition. |
Libraries and data sources
- date-fns differenceInBusinessDays and
addBusinessDaysfor JavaScript, though both assume a Saturday and Sunday weekend. - python-holidays covers over 150 countries including subdivisions, and computes moving holidays correctly.
- pandas CustomBusinessDay lets you define both the weekend mask and a holiday calendar, then use it as a frequency for date ranges.
- Nager.Date is a free public holiday API covering roughly 100 countries.
- UK bank holidays publishes an official JSON feed split by England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
- NETWORKDAYS.INTL reference for the full weekend code table.
What people use this for
Project timelines and sprint capacity, SLA and support response windows, payroll periods and leave balances, contractual notice periods, invoice payment terms quoted in business days, court and regulatory filing deadlines, shipping and lead time estimates, and working out whether a five day turnaround quoted on a Thursday before a long weekend is realistic. It usually is not.
Questions About Working Days Calculator Online Free
Select your start and end dates. Saturday and Sunday are excluded by default. The working day count appears instantly and reflects only Monday to Friday in the range. You can change which days are treated as weekend days by clicking the day buttons — useful if your work week runs Sunday to Thursday, for example.
Yes. Enter holiday dates in the custom holidays field, one per line, in YYYY-MM-DD format. For example, entering 2024-12-25 excludes Christmas Day from the count. The holidays excluded counter in the results tells you exactly how many were removed. There is no limit on how many holidays you can add.
Yes. Click the day buttons to mark any day as a non-working day. To calculate business days on a Monday to Thursday schedule, toggle Friday on in the weekend day selector alongside Saturday and Sunday. The tool recalculates immediately and skips all three days in the count.
Calendar days count every day in the range including weekends and holidays. Working days count only the days when business is typically conducted, so they exclude weekends and any holidays you specify. A 14-calendar-day range usually contains 10 working days. The results panel shows both figures so you can see the difference clearly.
Set the start date to today and pick an end date roughly where you expect the deadline to fall. The deadline projection in the results shows the exact calendar date that corresponds to the working day count from your start date, accounting for weekends and holidays. Adjust the end date until the working day count matches your target number.
From the blog
Date and time, explained properly
Longer write ups on the calendar problems these tools solve, from ISO week numbering to scheduling across time zones.
