Business Days Calculator – Count Working Days Between Dates
Calendar days and business days rarely match up. A "5 business day" shipping estimate placed on a Thursday actually takes more than a week once the weekend is skipped, and a "10 business day" notice period can stretch across three calendar weeks if a public holiday falls in the middle. The Business Days Calculator handles this arithmetic automatically, so payroll teams, project managers, and anyone tracking a working-day deadline get an accurate answer instantly.
Three Calculation Modes
Choose Between Two Dates to count how many working days fall inside a date range, or use Add Business Days / Subtract Business Days to project a target date forward or backward from a start date by a given count of working days. All three modes share the same weekend and holiday configuration, so switching modes keeps your settings intact.
Custom Weekends and Holidays
By default, Saturday and Sunday are treated as the weekend, but the calculator lets you pick any combination of weekdays as non-working — useful for regions where the weekend falls on Friday and Saturday instead. You can also list specific holiday dates, one per line in YYYY-MM-DD format, and each one is excluded from the count or skipped over when projecting a resulting date, just like a weekend day.
Inclusive and Exclusive Ranges
Whether the start or end date itself should count toward the total depends on how a deadline is worded. "5 business days from Monday" typically excludes Monday and counts forward, while "the period ending Friday" usually includes Friday. The Include Start Date and Include End Date toggles let you match either convention exactly, and both settings only apply in Between Two Dates mode.
Reading the Breakdown Table
Every calculation includes a day-by-day breakdown table listing each date in the range (or each day traversed while projecting a result), its day of the week, and whether it counted as a business day, a weekend, or a holiday. This makes it easy to verify exactly which days were excluded and why, and the table can be exported as a CSV file for record-keeping or sharing with a team.
Common Use Cases
This calculator is widely used for payroll processing and pay period calculations, legal and contract notice periods ("5 business days notice"), shipping and delivery estimates ("ships in 3–5 business days"), SLA (Service Level Agreement) tracking, invoice due dates, and project milestone scheduling that needs to skip weekends and office closures.
Limitations
Calculations support calendar years 1 through 9999 and are capped at roughly 100 years per calculation to keep results fast and accurate. Holiday dates must be entered manually — the calculator does not automatically apply a country-specific holiday calendar, since public holiday lists change annually and vary by jurisdiction. Time zones and daylight-saving shifts are not considered, since only whole calendar dates are used.