Free Workweek Calculator
Count business days between any two dates while skipping weekends and public holidays. 25+ country holiday databases (UK bank holidays, US federal, India, UAE, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Singapore and more), configurable workweek for Middle East patterns, and modes to add or subtract working days from a starting date. Live results, no login.
Workweek Calculator Tool
Everything in this free workweek & business days calculator
Built for project managers, freelancers, lawyers, accountants, HR teams, customer service operations and anyone who needs to count working days excluding weekends and public holidays. Whether you're calculating a delivery date, an SLA deadline, a contract notice period, a leave request or a Net 30 payment date in business days, this calculator handles every scenario across 25+ countries.
How to count business days — step by step
LazyTools vs other free workweek calculators
We surveyed the most-trafficked free business day calculators online — timeanddate.com, calculator.net, workingdays.org and businessdaysfromtoday.com — and built LazyTools to fill the gaps every one of them leaves open. Here's the feature-by-feature breakdown.
| Feature | LazyTools | timeanddate | calculator.net | workingdays.org | businessdays-fromtoday |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Days between two dates | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Add business days to a date | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | ✓ |
| Subtract business days (work back from deadline) | ✓ | limited | — | — | — |
| 25+ country holiday databases | ✓ | ✓ | US only | few | US only |
| India national holidays built in | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| UAE / Saudi / Gulf holidays | ✓ | paid | — | — | — |
| Sunday–Thursday workweek (Middle East) | ✓ | — | — | — | — |
| Custom workweek (any day combination) | ✓ | limited | Mon–Sat only | — | — |
| Custom holidays input | ✓ | — | — | — | — |
| Inclusive endpoint toggle | ✓ | limited | — | — | — |
| Show holidays in date range | ✓ | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Live calculation (no submit button) | ✓ | — | — | — | — |
| Quick-select date presets | ✓ | — | — | — | — |
| Saves your settings (no login) | ✓ | — | — | — | — |
| No registration / no email required | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free / no paywall | ✓ | freemium | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Where LazyTools wins: the only free tool with a configurable workweek that actually supports the Sunday–Thursday Middle East pattern, custom holidays input on top of country presets, an inclusive-endpoint toggle for contracts that count both dates, live calculation as you type, and persistent settings without an account. Where competitors win: timeanddate.com has a deeper holiday database for some niche jurisdictions, but it's behind a freemium gate for advanced features. Calculator.net has a clean simple interface but only supports US holidays. None of them combine all three core modes (between, add, subtract) with proper international workweek support in a single free tool.
Approximate working days per year by country
The table below shows the typical number of working days per year for major economies, based on a Monday–Friday workweek minus official public holidays. Actual counts vary year to year because some holidays fall on weekends in certain years (and may or may not be "lost" depending on the country's policy on substitute days).
| Country | Public holidays | Approx. working days/year | Workweek |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | 8 bank holidays (E&W) | ~253 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇺🇸 United States | 11 federal holidays | ~251 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇮🇳 India | 17 national holidays | ~248 | Mon–Fri (varies) |
| 🇩🇪 Germany | 9–13 (varies by state) | ~250 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇫🇷 France | 11 public holidays | ~252 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇮🇪 Ireland | 10 public holidays | ~252 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇮🇹 Italy | 12 public holidays | ~251 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇪🇸 Spain | 14 (national + regional) | ~249 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇳🇱 Netherlands | 11 public holidays | ~252 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇦🇺 Australia | 8 federal + state holidays | ~252 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇳🇿 New Zealand | 11 public holidays | ~252 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇨🇦 Canada | 9 federal + provincial | ~252 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇸🇬 Singapore | 11 public holidays | ~252 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇯🇵 Japan | 16 national holidays | ~248 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇰🇷 South Korea | 15 public holidays | ~248 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇦🇪 UAE | 13 public holidays | ~251 | Mon–Fri (since 2022) |
| 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia | 4 public holidays | ~256 | Sun–Thu |
| 🇿🇦 South Africa | 12 public holidays | ~251 | Mon–Fri |
| 🇨🇭 Switzerland | 9 federal (+ cantonal) | ~252 | Mon–Fri |
Note: Counts are approximate and vary by year because some holidays fall on weekends, and some countries grant a "substitute" weekday off when this happens (the UK, US, Singapore) while others do not (most of continental Europe). State or regional public holidays in federal countries (Germany, Australia, Canada, India) further reduce the working day count in some areas. Always verify with your local payroll or HR system if precise counts are required for legal or contractual purposes.
The Complete Guide to Counting Business Days — Why It Matters and How to Get It Right
The phrase "business days" appears in almost every contract, SLA, payment term, delivery promise and legal deadline you'll ever sign — yet most people, including most accountants, get the calculation slightly wrong. The reason is that "business days" sits at the awkward intersection of three things that vary by country and contract: which days of the week count as working days, which holidays should be excluded, and whether the start and end dates of the period are themselves counted. Get any of those wrong and you'll arrive at a date that's a day or two off from what your counterparty thinks. In low-stakes scenarios that's a minor annoyance. In high-stakes ones — missing a court filing deadline, defaulting on a payment, breaching an SLA — it can cost real money.
What "business days" actually means
A business day (also called a working day or weekday) is any day on which most businesses, banks and government offices are open for normal operations. In the vast majority of countries this means Monday through Friday, excluding officially designated public holidays. The opposite — non-business days — comprises the weekend (Saturday and Sunday in most of the world) and public holidays. The exact list of public holidays depends on the country and sometimes the region: the UK has 8 national bank holidays in England and Wales, the US has 11 federal holidays, India has 17 national holidays plus dozens of state-specific ones. When a contract or SLA refers to "business days" without further qualification, it usually means the public holidays of the jurisdiction where the relevant party is based — but not always, which is why precise contracts spell out the working calendar explicitly.
Business days vs calendar days — the distinction that matters
Calendar days count every day on the calendar, including weekends and holidays. Business days count only working weekdays. The difference is significant. A 30-calendar-day period is exactly four weeks plus two days. A 30-business-day period is roughly six calendar weeks because it skips eight to nine weekend days and possibly one or two holidays. If your contract says "payment is due within 30 days of invoice", that almost always means calendar days unless explicitly stated otherwise. If it says "30 business days" or "30 working days", you get the longer period. The default convention varies by jurisdiction and industry — UK consumer rights legislation often uses calendar days, US commercial contracts often use business days, EU GDPR uses calendar days for the right-of-access response, and so on. Always read the contract carefully and never assume.
The Saturday-Sunday weekend isn't universal
Most of the world treats Saturday and Sunday as the weekend, but this is far from a universal convention. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar have traditionally observed a Friday-Saturday weekend, with Sunday being the start of the working week. Israel uses Friday-Saturday, with Sunday being a normal working day. The UAE switched from Friday-Saturday to Saturday-Sunday on 1 January 2022 to align better with global financial markets, with Friday becoming a half-day for the public sector. Iran uses Thursday-Friday. India nominally observes Sunday-only weekends in many sectors, with Saturday being a working day in government and many private offices, though a five-day workweek has become more common in IT and multinationals. Some countries like Nepal observe a single-day weekend on Saturday only. When you're working with international clients or scheduling deliverables across borders, the workweek assumption is one of the easiest things to get wrong — and one of the most embarrassing, because a missed Tuesday deadline because "your Friday was actually your weekend" makes you look careless even when the time difference was the real cause.
Why you should use a calculator instead of counting by hand
Counting business days manually is one of those tasks that feels easy until it isn't. Counting 14 working days from a Tuesday is easy enough. Counting 47 working days from the third Wednesday of next month, with Easter falling somewhere in the middle, with two company shutdown days, in a year where Christmas is on a Wednesday — that's where mistakes happen. Spreadsheet users typically reach for Excel's NETWORKDAYS function (or NETWORKDAYS.INTL for non-Mon-Fri workweeks), which handles weekends and an optional list of holidays. Google Sheets has the same function. The maths is well-defined and doesn't change. But you still have to type the holiday list yourself, and a typo in the holiday array will silently produce wrong answers. A purpose-built calculator with a current public holiday database eliminates that source of error — you pick your country and the right holidays for the right year are already there.
Common scenarios where business day counting matters
Payment terms. Net 30 in a US commercial contract usually means calendar days, but Net 30 working days is becoming more common in EU contracts and Indian invoicing. Getting this right determines when a payment is officially "late" and when interest or penalty clauses kick in. SLAs. "Tickets resolved within 5 business days" needs a clear definition of business day to be meaningful — and the customer's business day, not the vendor's, if the vendor is in a different time zone. Project deadlines. "Deliverable due 20 working days from kick-off" requires both parties to agree on which working calendar applies, especially for international projects with teams in different countries. Legal deadlines. Court filings, statutory notice periods, limitation periods and consumer cooling-off rights are almost always defined in business or working days, with the exact definition specified in the relevant statute or court rules. HR processes. Notice periods, leave accrual, probation periods and statutory consultation periods all use working day calculations. Logistics. Shipping promises, customs clearance estimates, and delivery date commitments are usually quoted in business days because warehouses and customs offices don't operate on weekends.
Inclusive vs exclusive — does the start date count?
Most contracts and most calculator implementations count the period as exclusive of the start date and inclusive of the end date. So "5 business days from Monday" means Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, the following Monday (5 days after the start). But some contracts count both endpoints, and a few count neither. Always check your specific contract, and use the LazyTools calculator's Include both endpoints toggle when your scenario needs it. The difference is usually one day — small in absolute terms, large enough to put you on the wrong side of a deadline.
How the LazyTools workweek calculator handles all this
Pick your country to load the right public holiday calendar. Pick your working week (Mon–Fri default, Sun–Thu for the Middle East, or any custom combination by clicking individual day chips). Choose between three modes: count days between two dates, add days to a start date, or subtract days from an end date. Add custom holidays for company shutdowns or regional days off. Toggle inclusive counting if your contract requires it. The result updates live as you change anything, and the breakdown tells you exactly how many calendar days, business days, weekend days and holidays were involved in the calculation. No login, no signup, nothing leaves your browser.
For international teams — pair this with a time zone converter
If your business day calculation involves people or systems in multiple countries, the calendar question is only half the problem. The other half is what time it actually is in each location when a deadline ticks over. A Friday-end deadline for a US client is already Saturday morning for an Asian counterparty — and "Friday end of business" can mean wildly different things across time zones. Use the LazyTools Time Zone Converter alongside this calculator to nail both dimensions. It supports DST-aware conversion across all global time zones, multi-zone comparison views for scheduling international meetings, and quick conversion for any UTC offset.