Working Days Calculator

Why two people counting the same dates disagree

Counting working days looks like subtraction and is not, because three things have to be settled before the arithmetic means anything — and pages that answer instantly have quietly settled all three on your behalf.

Does the last day count?

Monday the 2nd to Friday the 6th is five working days if you count both ends, and four if you count only the gap between them. Both are correct. They answer different questions, and neither is more natural than the other: “how long am I away” counts both, “how many days until” counts neither end.

This is the single commonest reason two people with the same calendar get different numbers, so this page asks rather than assumes, and says which it used underneath the answer.

The weekend is not Saturday and Sunday

It is in most of Europe and the Americas. Across much of the Middle East and North Africa the weekend is Friday and Saturday, in a few countries it is Thursday and Friday or Sunday alone, and plenty of people work a four-day week or a rota that has nothing to do with any of them.

So the days off are a setting here rather than a constant. Change them and every number on the page changes with them.

There is no holiday list here, on purpose

Public holidays are national and often regional, several move each year with the lunar or ecclesiastical calendar, and governments add and shift them by decree — a one-off royal holiday, a bridging day, a rescheduled election.

A table of them printed into this page would be wrong within a year and would have no way of knowing it was wrong. That is worse than having none, because a stale list looks exactly like a current one. So you add the dates that actually apply where you are, and your browser keeps them for next time.

One detail worth knowing: only a holiday landing on a day you would have worked comes off the total. One that falls on a Saturday costs you nothing, and counting it would understate the month.

A year is 261 working days, until it is not

A plain Monday-to-Friday year comes to 261 days, or 262 when the extra days line up that way — 2024 had 262, and 2028, despite also being a leap year, has 260. Subtract your public holidays from that and you have the number a salary is actually divided by.

It is also why calendar weeks and working days are worth keeping apart in a plan. Five weeks is thirty-five days on a calendar and twenty-five days of work, and a schedule built on the first number runs late by about two days a week.

Clock changes cannot break the count

Twice a year a local day is twenty-three or twenty-five hours long. Counting a date range by adding twenty-four hours at a time to a local date therefore skips or repeats a day somewhere in March and October — a whole working day wrong, in the months people most often count their leave. Everything here is counted in universal time, where every day is the same length.

Nothing you type is sent anywhere

The dates, the holidays, all of it stays in your browser. The holidays you add are stored on this device only, and there is no account and nothing transmitted.