Overview
Count the working days between two dates, with optional Saturday and Sunday exclusion and a holiday adjustment. Useful for notice periods, delivery windows, SLA counts and leave requests. The count runs as you change the dates, entirely in your browser, and the same fields work backwards as well as forwards.
How It Works
Set a start date and an end date; the start defaults to today and the end to thirty days out. Tick Skip Saturdays or Skip Sundays to exclude them (both on by default), and type how many public holidays fall inside the range in the Holidays field. Two result cards show the business-day count and the total calendar-day count. If the end date is before the start date the tool simply counts backwards rather than complaining, which is handy for checking how many working days ago something happened.
Step-by-Step Usage Guide
- Enter the start and end dates.
- Untick Saturday or Sunday if your working week includes them.
- Count the public holidays inside the range and enter the number.
- Read the business-days and total-days results.
Technical Specifications & Standards
The implementation walks the calendar day by day between the two endpoints, inclusive of both, inspecting each day's weekday. Days matching Saturday or Sunday are skipped when the corresponding checkbox is set, and everything else counts as a business day; the holiday figure is then subtracted from that count at the end, floored at zero. Because holidays are entered as a single number rather than as dates, the tool cannot tell whether a holiday falls on a weekday you already skip - it is a manual correction, and one that assumes you counted only the holidays that actually land on counted days. Date parsing uses midnight of the local calendar day, and the loop steps in whole days, so daylight-saving transitions inside the range do not distort the count the way millisecond arithmetic would. Total days counts both endpoints; a Monday-to-Friday week therefore shows five total days and five business days.
Targeted Use Cases
- Checking whether a contractual 10-working-day notice period has elapsed.
- Estimating delivery or processing times that exclude weekends.
- HR calculations for probation periods and leave balances.
- Project management: converting a calendar deadline into realistic working days.
Notes & Gotchas
- Count only holidays that fall Monday to Friday before entering them.
- Include both endpoints when interpreting the result - the first day counts.
- For long ranges, remember the tool does not know country-specific holiday calendars.
- Reverse the dates to count backwards without swapping fields mentally.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are the start and end dates included in the count?
Yes, both endpoints are counted if they are not excluded weekend days. A Monday start and Friday end gives five business days with both weekends skipped.
How do holidays work?
You enter a number of holidays in the range, and that many days are subtracted from the business-day total. The tool does not ship holiday calendars, because these differ by country and even by region.
What happens if the end date is before the start date?
The count simply runs backwards over the same span, so the business-day figure is the same either way.
Does daylight saving affect the count?
No. The tool steps over calendar days rather than subtracting millisecond differences, so a DST change inside the range cannot shift the result by an hour.