Business Days Calculator

The Business Days Calculator counts the number of working days between two dates by excluding weekends and public holidays from your chosen calendar. It supports thirteen built-in national holiday calendars, four workweek patterns (including the Sunday–Thursday Middle East schedule and 6-day or 7-day workweeks), custom company off-days, and half-day observances such as Christmas Eve afternoons. The result includes a calendar visualization, a month-by-month breakdown, and a list of every holiday that was excluded so you can audit the number quickly.

How to Use This Business Days Calculator

• Pick a start date and an end date, and decide whether the end date itself should be counted.
• Choose a workweek pattern — standard Monday–Friday, 6-day Monday–Saturday, Middle East Sunday–Thursday, or a 7-day open schedule.
• Tick one or more country calendars to remove statutory holidays from the count. The Americas, Europe, and APAC quick buttons let you pick whole regions at once.
• Add custom holidays (such as company off-days or local observances) and half-day holidays, one entry per line in the format YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DD: description.
• Press Calculate and review the business-day total, the monthly breakdown, the holiday list, and the calendar view.

Working-Day Math

The calculator iterates one day at a time across the range. A date counts as a business day when it falls on a working weekday and is not present in any selected holiday calendar or in your custom full-day list. Half-day holidays still count as business days but reduce the effective working-day total by 0.5. If the same date appears in multiple sources (for example a country holiday plus a custom entry), the date is excluded only once and the source list reports both.

Holiday Calendars Covered

Built-in calendars include the United States (federal), United Kingdom (England & Wales), Canada (federal), Australia (national), New Zealand, Germany (federal), France (national), Ireland (public), India (central gazetted), Japan (national), China (mainland), Hong Kong, and Singapore. The calculator handles weekend substitution rules for US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland — for example, US holidays that fall on a Saturday move to Friday and Sunday holidays move to Monday. Lunar-calendar countries (China, Hong Kong, Singapore) use the official observed dates published by the government for each year.

Workweek Patterns

• Monday–Friday: the standard five-day workweek used across most of the world for office and professional services.
• Monday–Saturday: a six-day workweek common in retail, construction, and parts of Asia and Latin America.
• Sunday–Thursday: the Middle East schedule used in countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar, where Friday and Saturday are the weekend.
• All seven days: useful for 24/7 operations, healthcare rotations, or hospitality scheduling where weekends are working days.

Use Cases

• Project timelines and Gantt charts that need accurate working-day estimates.
• Payroll calculations where pay is based on actual workdays in a pay period.
• Shipping and SLA deadlines that exclude weekends and holidays in the destination country.
• Legal contract deadlines where "business days" must be defined unambiguously.
• Travel planning and out-of-office coverage that needs to honor multiple national calendars at once.

FAQ

Why do my results differ from another calculator? Most differences come from three things: whether the end date is included, which workweek pattern is used, and which holiday calendar is applied. Check those three settings before comparing tools.

How are half days counted? A half day is a working day where employees are off for part of the day. It still adds 1 to the business-day count but reduces the effective working-day total by 0.5. Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve are common examples.

Are religious and regional holidays included? The built-in lists focus on national statutory holidays. Regional holidays (state-level US holidays, German Länder, Indian state holidays, UK home nations, etc.) and faith-specific observances can be added to the custom holidays field.

Can I count weekends as working days? Yes. Switch the workweek pattern to Monday–Saturday or the 7-day schedule and the calculator will treat the weekend days as working days. Holidays that fall on those days will still be excluded.

How far ahead do the lunar calendars work? China, Hong Kong, and Singapore lunar-derived holidays are published year by year. The built-in tables cover the years where official dates have been announced, and you can paste additional dates into the custom holidays field for future years.