Business Days Calculator

A business day is a weekday that is not a public holiday.

Business days = calendar days − weekend days − holidays on a weekday

The calculator walks through every date in your range, sets aside each Saturday and Sunday, then sets aside the US federal holidays that land on a weekday, using the date each one is observed rather than the date in the law. The start date always counts. The end date counts too unless you untick the box, which is the setting to use when you want the days up to a date rather than through it.

Weekend means Saturday and Sunday. OPM, the federal personnel office, notes that most federal employees work a Monday through Friday schedule, and that is the week this calculator counts. The second mode runs the other way, stepping forward or back from a start date one business day at a time. The start date is not one of the days added, so one business day after a Friday is the Monday.

Monday, November 2 to Monday, November 30, 2026 has 19 business days.

Those are the dates the calculator opens with, and November is a good test because it has two federal holidays on weekdays.

• Calendar days: November 2 to 30, counting both dates, is 29 days.
• Weekend days: four Saturdays (the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th) and four Sundays (the 8th, 15th, 22nd and 29th), so 8.
• Federal holidays: Veterans Day on Wednesday, November 11 and Thanksgiving Day on Thursday, November 26, so 2.
• Business days: 29 − 8 − 2 = 19, and at 8 hours a day that is 152 working hours.

Untick “Count the end date” and the answer drops to 18, because Monday, November 30 is a business day. Untick “Skip US federal holidays” instead and it rises to 21, the number of weekdays in the range. Switch to “Add days” with the same start date and 10 business days, and the answer is Tuesday, November 17, 2026. Two calendar weeks after November 2 is Monday, November 16, but Veterans Day sits inside the range, so the tenth business day lands one day later.

Federal law sets 11 holidays, and a weekend holiday moves to a weekday.

The list comes from 5 U.S.C. 6103, the law that sets holidays for federal employees: New Year's Day (January 1), the Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. (the third Monday in January), Washington's Birthday (the third Monday in February), Memorial Day (the last Monday in May), Juneteenth National Independence Day (June 19), Independence Day (July 4), Labor Day (the first Monday in September), Columbus Day (the second Monday in October), Veterans Day (November 11), Thanksgiving Day (the fourth Thursday in November) and Christmas Day (December 25). Juneteenth joined the list in 2021, and the calculator includes it from that year on.

Six of the eleven always fall on a Monday or a Thursday. The other five have fixed dates and can land on a weekend. OPM's federal holidays page gives the rule: “If a holiday falls on a Saturday, for most Federal employees, the preceding Friday will be treated as a holiday for pay and leave purposes,” and a Sunday holiday is treated as falling on the following Monday. The calculator applies that rule, which is why its holiday list sometimes shows a date that is not the one on the calendar.

2026 has one move: Independence Day is a Saturday, so it is observed on Friday, July 3. 2027 has four, and the last is easy to miss. New Year's Day 2028 falls on a Saturday, so OPM lists it as observed on Friday, December 31, 2027, a holiday that belongs to one year and lands in the one before.

Two kinds of day off are left out of the calculator. Inauguration Day, January 20 every fourth year, is a holiday only for federal employees in the Washington, DC, area, according to OPM. The law also covers “any other day declared to be a holiday by Federal statute or Executive order”, which no fixed list can know in advance, so subtract any such day by hand.

A full-time year in 2026 has 250 working days, or 2,000 hours.

2026 starts on a Thursday and is not a leap year, so it has 261 weekdays. All 11 federal holidays land on a weekday, which leaves 250 working days, or 2,000 hours at 8 hours a day. 2027 also has 261 weekdays, but it carries 12 weekday holidays because of that December 31 observance, so it has 249 working days and 1,992 hours.

The month matters as much as the year. A salary paid monthly buys 19 working days in February 2026 and 22 in March, so the pay per working day is about 16% higher in February. Anyone paid by the hour sees the difference in the paycheck instead. The hours calculator and the time card calculator add up the hours themselves, and the hourly to salary calculator turns a rate into a monthly or yearly figure.

Private employers set their own holidays, so count with your own calendar.

The federal list sets holidays for federal employees, not for every business. The Department of Labor says the Fair Labor Standards Act “does not require payment for time not worked, such as vacations or holidays (federal or otherwise),” and that these benefits “are generally a matter of agreement between an employer and an employee (or the employee's representative).” Your company may give fewer than eleven, or days that are not on the list.

• If you work every federal holiday, untick “Skip US federal holidays” and the count becomes plain weekdays.
• If your company gives only some of them, keep the box ticked and add back each one you work, using the list under the result.
• If it gives extra days, such as the day after Thanksgiving, subtract them from the result.
• For paid time off across the year, the PTO accrual calculator shows how many hours each pay period earns.

Weekend work is the other exception. A six-day schedule has more business days than this calculator shows, and the pay for the extra hours is a question for the overtime calculator.

Business days turn a notice period into a real last day.

Most deadlines at work are counted in days, and the contract decides which kind. Two weeks' notice in calendar days is simple. Notice counted in business days is not, because a holiday inside it pushes the last day out. Hand in notice on Friday, November 20, 2026, and 10 business days later is Monday, December 7, not Friday, December 4, because Thanksgiving falls inside the period. The resignation letter generator then puts the date you settle on into the letter, written out in full.

The same count works from the employer's side. A handover planned across November 2026 has 19 business days to work with, not 21 weekdays, and the offboarding checklist lays out what should happen in them, from the day notice is given to the week after the last day.

Every last day on a calendar starts with a decision nobody saw.

A business days count tells you exactly how long a notice period is. It cannot tell you when the next one will start. By the time a resignation reaches your inbox, the decision behind it has already been made, and the notice period that follows is all the time left for a handover. TeamPredict works on the part before that, reading public LinkedIn signals to flag resignation risk early, so the first sign of a departure is a warning while there is still time to talk, rather than a last day already circled on the calendar.