Business Days Calculator

How to use it

1. Choose which question you are answering. "Count business days" measures the working days between two dates — useful for deadlines, response windows and payment terms. "Add or subtract" moves a date by a number of working days — useful for "20 working days from today".
2. Paste your holidays, if you have them. Without them the tool skips weekends only. One date per line or separated by commas; whatever is not a date is ignored and reported.
3. Check which end dates are being counted. Both ends are counted by default, which is how a working week is normally described. If your contract excludes the day of an event, switch that end off.

What counts as a business day here

A business day on this page is any date that is not a Saturday, not a Sunday and not a date you listed as a holiday. That is the whole definition, and it is deliberately narrow:

• No built-in holiday calendar. Public holidays vary by country and region, are set by different levels of government, change most years, and are often swapped for working days elsewhere in the same week. A table we shipped would be wrong for most visitors most of the time — and a wrong deadline is worse than no deadline.
• No assumption about your working week. Saturday and Sunday are assumed. If your rest days are different, the tool cannot express that, and the FAQ says so plainly rather than offering a setting that would quietly change what every number means.
• No time zone games. Dates are treated as plain calendar dates. They are never converted through UTC, which is the usual cause of a date tool being one day out for half the world.

Counting business days: what the number includes

The count is a closed interval by default: if both the first and last dates are business days, both are counted. So Monday to Friday is 5 business days, and Monday to the following Monday is 6.

That is not the only convention. Payroll and legal windows often exclude the day of an event — "within 10 working days of the notice date" normally starts counting the following day — and some exclude the end date instead. Rather than pick one for you, the two checkboxes control it, and the result rows show the count excluding both ends as well so you can compare at a glance.

The categories always reconcile, which is worth checking once so you trust the rest:

weekend days + holidays on business days + business days = calendar days in the range

Adding business days: is the start date day one?

This is the same ambiguity in a different costume, and it changes the answer by a whole working day. Two conventions are both in wide use:

• Start date not counted (the default here): Monday plus 1 business day is Tuesday, and Monday plus 5 business days is the Monday after.
• Start date counted as day one: Monday plus 5 business days is Friday of the same week. This is the convention used for a "10 working days" notice period, where the day you give notice is day one.

Switch the option and the answer updates. If you are working from a contract that says "10 working days", turn it on — and note that the notice period calculator uses that same convention, so both pages give the same date for the same notice period.

Counting backwards works the same way with a negative number, and if the starting date is itself a weekend or holiday the count begins from the next business day.

Worked examples

Where to go next

• Date difference calculator — the full gap between two dates in years, months and days, plus total days, weeks and working days.
• Notice period calculator — the working day convention applied to the day you resign, including month-end dates and rolled-back last working days.
• Everyday tools — the rest of this category: word counts and percentages.

Common questions

Do you count the start date as one of the business days?

You choose. When counting between two dates, both ends are included by default, so Monday to Friday is five business days — which is how most people describe a working week. When adding a number of business days to a date, the start date is not counted by default, so Monday plus 5 business days is the following Monday. Switch the option on and the start date becomes day one, which is the convention a "10 working days" notice period uses.

Does the calculator know my country’s public holidays?

No, and that is deliberate. Public holidays differ by country and region, are set by different levels of government, change most years, and are often swapped for working days elsewhere in the same week. A built-in list would be wrong for most visitors and would produce a confidently incorrect deadline. Paste your own dates and they are skipped exactly.

What if my weekend is Friday and Saturday rather than Saturday and Sunday?

The calculator assumes Saturday and Sunday, which is the most common arrangement but not a universal one. There is no setting for a different weekend, because changing which days are rest days would silently change the meaning of every result on the page. If your weekend differs, count calendar days with the date difference calculator and subtract the rest days by hand — a small amount of manual work is better than a number you cannot explain.

How many business days are there in a month?

Between 20 and 23, and that is the honest range rather than a fixed answer. A 31-day month with no holidays and weekends in the right places has 23 business days; February with a holiday can drop to 20. Enter the first and last day of the month, list any holidays, and the calculator gives you the exact figure for that month.

How do I add 30 business days to a date?

Switch to "add business days", enter the starting date and 30. The result is the date 30 business days later, and the rows underneath show how many calendar days that actually covered, plus how many weekend days and holidays were skipped on the way. That second figure is usually the surprising one: 30 business days is six calendar weeks before any holidays are taken into account.

Is a bank holiday or a company day off a business day?

For this calculator, a business day is any day that is not a Saturday, a Sunday or a date you listed. Whether a specific closure counts is a question about your contract, your client or your country, not arithmetic — so it is left to you. List it and it is skipped; leave it out and it is counted as a working day.