Use this working days calculator to easily calculate the number of business days (excluding weekends) between any two given dates or to add business days to a date. In the first mode it functions as a business days counter and in the second it estimates how long is N business days from today or any other date. Official holidays need to be counted separately based on your localized holiday calendar.
Quick navigation:
- Calculate how many business days are between two dates
- How long is N business days from today?
- The business day and the week
Calculate how many business days are between two dates
If you wish to know how many work days you have until a job deadline, until retirement or even until your wedding, you simply need to enter the start date and the end date of the period you are interested in while in "Business days counter" mode. The result will show you all days until the said date excluding the weekends. You can also choose whether to include the last day of the period in the final calculation.
For example, if you have to deliver a project by Dec 1, 2024, enter that date in the "end date" field, and if you are starting from today, leave the "start date" field as it is by default. Click "Calculate" and you will get the number of work days you will have. This way you will know how many business days are available for you to complete the job. If you will only be available to work on that project from Nov 1 onwards, just enter that as a starting date instead.
This working days calculator counts as business days all days between Monday and Friday, regardless of whether they are holidays in some regions. Therefore, you need to be aware of your country’s holiday calendar and subtract the said amount of days from the final result.
Our business days calculator does not account for country-specific holidays, so if there are official holidays particular to your country or region, you need to account for that by manually subtracting the number of days with such holidays from the result you get from our calculator.
How long is N business days from today?
Calculating which date would be after a given number of working days or how long is N business days from today in calendar days is another common use for our tool. For example, to calculate how long is 5 business days from today, that is to add 5 business days to a date, simply select "Add business days" mode and then enter five in the field for how many days to add. If you want to see which date is 7 business days from today, do the same, but enter seven. The tool will also count the number of calendar days N business days from today, essentially doubling as a day counter.
To work with a date different from today's, just change the "Start date" field's date to the one you are interested in. For example, to estimate how long is 10 business days from a date in the future, just enter that date as a start date field and enter 10 in the next input to perform the addition. Remember to add one day for each holiday during that time, e.g. New Year's Eve, Christmas, Easter and others, since while they are widely observed in certain countries, that is not the case in others.
Advanced tip: if you put a negative number in the "Add" field, that many weekdays will be subtracted from the start date!
The business day and the week
A business day, also known as a working day, is any official work day. In most regions this includes the days between Monday and Friday (including). It excludes the weekend and official holidays in the given country; these can be religious or national holidays. There are about 20 business days in a month.
But why do we work from Monday to Friday in Western countries? And why is a week seven days?
Although it is widely believed that the idea of a seven day week comes from Babylon and is based on the Moon cycles, there are those who disagree. Some claim that the Jewish people had their own completely separate reasons for creating a similar way of dividing the month. In defense of the latter theory there seems to be evidence to suggest that Judaists used such seven days based cycles unrelated to the moon no later than the 6th century BC.
While we might never have a straight answer to how weeks were invented, where, when, and why; one thing is obvious – a large part of the world today uses weeks comprised of seven days, which also mark when the work days (also school days) and when the rest days are. This is usually applied alongside the Gregorian calendar, although not exclusively. What is also common between most countries is having two rest days in the week, although in different cultures it varies which days exactly those would be. In most of Western cultures the rest days are Saturday and Sunday, and the working days - Monday through Friday.
The two-day weekend was applied in the UK, US, and Canada by 1955. Multiple factors led to that and it took decades for the idea to be accepted by employers. The 40-hour work week only became the rule throughout Europe in the 70s, followed by the Middle East.
This calculator is not suitable for some countries, where the weekend starts on Friday and ends on Saturday, or where there is a one-day weekend.
