Skip to content

Working Days Calculator

Working days

5

Calendar days
7
Weekend days
2
Holidays skipped
0

Half-open range: start date counted, end date not. Reversed ranges return negative counts.

Estimates for educational purposes — not financial, medical, or legal advice. See terms.

Count working days between two dates, excluding weekends and national public holidays for one of five countries. Useful for project scheduling, contract deadlines, SLA calculations, vacation planning, and anywhere you need to know “how many actual working days do I have?” without double-counting weekends or forgetting that Christmas Day isn’t a business day.

How it works

Pick two dates, pick a country. The tool counts weekdays between the dates, subtracts any of that country’s national public holidays that fall inside the range, and shows the result alongside a breakdown: total calendar days, weekend days, and the specific list of holidays that were skipped.

The range is half-open: the start date is counted, the end date is not. This matches how most real-world scheduling works. “I have 5 business days to finish this, starting Monday” usually means you get Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri (5 days) with the deadline on the following Monday. If you reverse the range (end date before start date), the counts come back negative — same magnitude, opposite sign.

Holidays are generated from rules, not looked up in a static table. Rule-based generation means the tool works correctly for any future year without needing annual updates: Easter moves via the Gauss-Meeus algorithm, US Thanksgiving is always the 4th Thursday of November, UK Spring bank holiday is always the last Monday of May. The whole holiday database is a few hundred lines of code and a handful of KB in the bundle.

Supported countries

United States (11 federal holidays) — New Year’s Day, MLK Day (3rd Mon January), Presidents’ Day (3rd Mon February), Memorial Day (last Mon May), Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day (1st Mon September), Columbus Day (2nd Mon October), Veterans Day, Thanksgiving (4th Thu November), Christmas Day.

United Kingdom (8 England & Wales bank holidays) — New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Early May bank holiday (1st Mon May), Spring bank holiday (last Mon May), Summer bank holiday (last Mon August), Christmas Day, Boxing Day.

Germany (9 federal holidays — Bundesweit only) — Neujahr, Karfreitag, Ostermontag, Tag der Arbeit, Christi Himmelfahrt, Pfingstmontag, Tag der Deutschen Einheit, 1. Weihnachtsfeiertag, 2. Weihnachtsfeiertag. State-specific holidays (Epiphany in Bavaria, Reformation Day in Protestant states, All Saints’ Day in Catholic states) are not included.

France (11 jours fériés) — Jour de l’An, Lundi de Pâques, Fête du Travail, Victoire 1945, Ascension, Lundi de Pentecôte, Fête Nationale, Assomption, Toussaint, Armistice 1918, Noël.

Netherlands (8 or 9 holidays) — Nieuwjaarsdag, Goede Vrijdag, Tweede Paasdag, Koningsdag (27 April), Hemelvaartsdag, Tweede Pinksterdag, Eerste Kerstdag, Tweede Kerstdag. Bevrijdingsdag (5 May) is only an official day off every fifth year (2020, 2025, 2030 …) for most Dutch employers, so it’s included in those years only.

Example: US project deadline across Thanksgiving

Project kicks off on Monday 2026-11-23. You have 5 working days. When’s the deadline?

Pick start = 2026-11-23, end = 2026-11-30 (a guess — seven calendar days later), country = United States. The tool reports 4 working days, 7 calendar days, 2 weekend days, and 1 holiday skipped: Thanksgiving on 2026-11-26. So a 7-day range only yields 4 working days — the skipped holiday plus the weekend eat a full day off the count.

To actually get 5 working days, you’d need to extend the end to 2026-12-01 (Tuesday), giving you Mon, Tue, Wed, Fri (Thu is Thanksgiving), Mon = 5 working days.

Example: UK contract spanning Easter

A contract says “delivery within 10 working days of signing”, signed on Monday 2026-03-30. When’s the latest acceptable delivery date?

Pick start = 2026-03-30, end = try 2026-04-20 (three weeks out), country = United Kingdom. The tool reports 13 working days in that range. Too long — scale back. Try end = 2026-04-15: 9 working days (skipped Good Friday 03 and Easter Monday 06 knock out 2 days of an otherwise 4-day Easter week). Try end = 2026-04-16: 10 working days. So the latest delivery date is 2026-04-16 — a Thursday, 18 calendar days after signing.

Without the holiday awareness, a naive 2-weeks-equals-10-working-days estimate would have landed on Monday 2026-04-13, which would be 2 days too early because of the Easter closure.

Example: German vacation planning

You’re booking holiday in Germany and want to maximise the ratio of vacation days to actual days off. The trick: pick a week that contains a public holiday so one of your vacation days comes free.

Start = 2026-05-11 (Mon), end = 2026-05-18 (Mon), country = Germany. Result: 4 working days (Christi Himmelfahrt falls on Thursday 2026-05-14), 7 calendar days, 2 weekend days, 1 holiday skipped. Book Mon-Wed-Fri as vacation and you get a 5-day stretch off (Wed + Thu public holiday + Fri vacation + weekend) for only 3 vacation days. Book the full Mon-Fri and you get the same 9 days off (counting the weekend on either side) for 4 vacation days.

What this tool does not do

It doesn’t handle state, province, or region-specific holidays. Germany’s state patchwork, US state holidays (Good Friday, Patriots’ Day, Emancipation Day DC), French overseas department holidays — none of those are included. The tool sticks to nation-wide observances. If you need regional precision, you need to supply your own holiday set.

It doesn’t handle half days. Christmas Eve in much of Germany is a half day in practice (many offices close at noon), but it’s not an official public holiday, so the tool treats it as a full working day. Same for New Year’s Eve.

It doesn’t support non-Gregorian calendars. Islamic holidays (Eid), Jewish holidays (Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur), Chinese New Year, Hindu Diwali — none of these are on the list. For a country like Israel or India where these matter, you’d need a different tool.

It doesn’t support observance rules (“when a holiday falls on a Sunday, the Monday is also a day off”). Some countries (the UK, Australia) apply these rules formally; the tool doesn’t implement them because they vary. A holiday that falls on Saturday or Sunday is still counted as a holiday (meaning: already not a working day), but no additional Monday-in-lieu is added.

It doesn’t read your company’s private holiday list. If your employer takes the Friday after Thanksgiving off as a company holiday (common in US tech), that’s a company-specific policy, not a federal one, so it’s not on the list. For a BYO-holiday-list variant (supply your own holidays, get the same math), the business day calculator is the flexible sibling; for a start + N-days → deadline walk, the deadline calculator is the forward variant.

Frequently asked questions

Which countries' holidays are included?

Five countries with fully rule-based holiday calculation: the United States (11 federal holidays), the United Kingdom (8 England & Wales bank holidays), Germany (9 federal holidays — Bundesweit only), France (11 jours fériés), and the Netherlands (8 or 9 depending on whether Bevrijdingsdag falls in a divisible-by-5 year). The holidays are computed from rules, not from a static table, so the tool works for any future year without needing annual updates. Easter-based holidays use the Gauss-Meeus algorithm and are correct from the year 1583 onwards.

Why are state or regional holidays not included?

Because they vary too much to be useful as a single list. Germany's state-level holidays (Epiphany in Bavaria, Assumption in Saarland, Reformation Day in Protestant states) would need sub-country selection, and the US has many state-only holidays (Good Friday in some states, Patriots' Day in Maine and Massachusetts, Emancipation Day in DC) that aren't federal. The tool sticks to national / federal public holidays — the ones that are uniformly observed across the entire country. If you need a regional list, you'll need to supply your own holiday set.

How is Easter calculated?

Using the Gauss / Meeus algorithm for Gregorian Easter, which is the standard computus used by most Western Christian churches (Roman Catholic, Protestant, Anglican). The algorithm takes a year and returns the Gregorian date of Easter Sunday using simple modular arithmetic — no lookup tables required. Once Easter Sunday is known, derived holidays are computed by day-shifting: Good Friday = Easter − 2, Easter Monday = Easter + 1, Ascension = Easter + 39, Whit Monday = Easter + 50. Orthodox Easter uses a different algorithm (Julian computus) and is not included because none of the five supported countries use Orthodox Easter as their official holiday calendar.

Does the half-open range matter for business counting?

Yes — it matches how businesses usually count. A half-open range means the start date is counted but the end date is not. If you say 'I have 5 business days to finish this, starting Monday' and Monday is the start date, you'd count Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri (5 days) and the deadline lands on the following Monday — which is day 6 from the start and NOT counted. That's how contracts, SLAs, and most project deadlines are framed. Reversed ranges (end before start) return negative counts for consistency.

What if my date range spans multiple years?

It works — the tool generates the holiday list for every year in the range. A query spanning, say, 2026 through 2030 will include holidays from all five years automatically. Performance is fine for ranges of any realistic length; the holiday computation is O(years) and the business-day counting is O(days), so even a decade-long range processes in milliseconds.