Business Days Calculator
Count the working days between two dates, or add and subtract business days - skipping weekends and any holidays you enter.
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- No usage limit
About the Business Days Calculator
This counts the working days between two dates, or adds a stretch of business days onto a date to see where you land, skipping weekends and whatever holidays you give it. The thing most calculators quietly get wrong is whether the first and last day count, and instead of deciding that for you behind your back, it hands you the switch and shows every day it skipped. Everything runs in your browser, so nothing you type gets sent anywhere.
The reason to reach for this one instead of Excel or the first calculator in the search results comes down to a single setting almost nobody else exposes. When a contract, a court, or a shipping promise says "business days," one detail decides the answer: do the start and end dates themselves count? Most tools pick for you and never say which. Excel's NETWORKDAYS always counts both ends and gives you no switch to change it. Plenty of online calculators just pick one behavior and stay silent about which. Get that wrong on a real deadline and you're off by a day or two, which is the gap between filing on time and missing the window. So the choice lives on a checkbox here, and the result shows you every weekend and holiday it skipped, so you can check the number instead of trusting it.
How to use it
- Pick a mode. Count business days measures the working days between two dates you already have. Add / subtract business days takes one date plus a number and hands you the target date.
- Count mode: choose a start and an end date. The answer updates the moment both are valid, no button to press.
- Add mode: choose a start date and type how many business days to add. A negative number walks backward instead, so
-3finds the date three working days before your start. - Set the endpoint rule (count mode). Leave Count both endpoints ticked and the start and end dates each count as a day when they're weekdays. Untick it and you get only the working days strictly between them. This one checkbox is the biggest source of off-by-one arguments, more on it below.
- Paste your holidays into the box, one date per line or separated by commas, each written
YYYY-MM-DD. A holiday only bites when it falls on a weekday inside your range. One that lands on a Saturday was already being skipped. - Read the skipped-day cards. They tell you how many weekend days and how many holidays got excluded, which is how you sanity-check the total in a couple of seconds.
Enter the dates backward and nothing breaks. The count treats it as an absolute span and drops a quiet note that the end came first. Leave a field empty and you get a plain prompt, never an Invalid Date or a stray number where the answer should be.
The endpoint trap, and why it changes your number
Weekends are the easy part, people handle those fine. Where a business-day count actually slips is the two dates on the ends.
Say a window runs from Monday the 6th to Friday the 10th. Count both endpoints and that's 5 business days: the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th. Count only the days strictly between them and it's 3, because the 6th and 10th drop out. The same two dates give two legitimate answers, and which one is right depends entirely on what you're measuring.
For an event, a conference, a stretch of paid leave, you almost always want both ends. The first day counts and so does the last. Contracts and legal notice periods are where it flips. The phrase to watch is "clear business days," which usually means neither the start day nor the deadline day counts, only the whole working days in between. Miss that wording and your deadline slides by a day or two. In a filing or a statutory notice, that day or two can blow the deadline outright.
This is the exact thing a spreadsheet can't flex on. Excel and Google Sheets both give you NETWORKDAYS(start, end, [holidays]) to count and WORKDAY(start, days, [holidays]) to add, and they're solid for running the calculation down a thousand rows. But NETWORKDAYS is inclusive of both ends with no option to switch, so "clear business days" needs extra formula gymnastics it doesn't do on its own, where here the same thing is a checkbox. Tick for inclusive, untick for exclusive, and the skipped-day breakdown updates so you can watch what moved.
Bring your own holidays
Most calculators ship with a fixed holiday list, usually the US federal days, and treat it as gospel. That's fine right up until your holidays aren't those holidays. A bank in another country, a state with its own public days, a company calendar with a floating shutdown week, a court that observes a different set, none of them match a hardcoded national list, and a wrong list produces wrong results every time it is used.
So there's no built-in list here on purpose. You paste the exact dates that apply to your situation and only those get skipped. Mix line-separated and comma-separated dates however you like. Anything that isn't a real YYYY-MM-DD date gets ignored with a small note rather than breaking the count, so a blank line or a stray typo won't throw the total off. And a holiday only changes the answer when it lands on a weekday inside your range. Drop New Year's Day on a Sunday and the count doesn't budge, because that Sunday was never a working day to begin with.
The working week here is Monday to Friday, hardcoded. If your weekend is Friday and Saturday, as it is across much of the Middle East, or you run a four-day or six-day week, the weekend logic won't match you, and neither will the standard NETWORKDAYS. For the Monday-to-Friday week that covers most of North America, Europe, and Australia, it's accurate the moment you type the dates.
Frequently asked questions
If a holiday lands on my start or end date, does that day still count?
No. Count both endpoints only counts a start or end date when it's an ordinary working day, so a holiday sitting right on one end drops out, same as a weekend would. Say your range opens on a public holiday that happens to fall on a Tuesday. That Tuesday won't add to the total even though it's a weekday, and the skipped-holidays card shows it came out. So double-check the number whenever your window starts or ends on a date you pasted.
Why does adding 5 business days to a Monday land on the next Monday?
Because a full working week is five days and the weekend in the middle doesn't count toward it. From Monday, the five working days you cross are Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, then the following Monday. Add mode also never counts your start date itself, day one is the first working day after it. Slip a holiday into that week and the target slides out one more day.
How many business days are in a month or a year?
Roughly 21 or 22 in a month, and somewhere around 250 to 260 in a year once weekends and public holidays come out. Those are handy for a gut check, though they are averages rather than answers. The real count for any specific span depends on where the weekends and holidays actually fall, which is the whole reason to count day by day instead of multiplying.
Does my time zone or daylight saving change the result?
No. It works on plain calendar dates and steps one day at a time, comparing each day by its year, month, and day rather than by a raw timestamp. A daylight-saving jump makes a day 23 or 25 hours long, and that is exactly the kind of thing that trips up tools doing millisecond math, so it cannot shift a count here. The same date reads the same wherever you are.
Is there a limit on how far apart the two dates can be?
For anything you'd actually type, no. The count walks the calendar one day at a time, so even a span of several years resolves the instant both dates are valid. There's a hard safety ceiling of more than two centuries, so a wildly out-of-range date can never lock up the page, but you won't come near it on a real deadline. That same ceiling guards add mode if you ever ask for an absurd number of business days.
Do duplicate or leftover holiday lines throw off the count?
No, so a messy list is fine. Paste the same date twice and it still counts once, because each holiday is matched by its calendar day rather than by how many times you typed it. Dates that fall outside your range just sit in the box doing nothing, so you can keep a full year of company holidays there and only the ones inside your span will register. That makes it safe to reuse one master list across a lot of different date ranges.