Business Days Between Dates and Excel NETWORKDAYS
How business days are counted, inclusive versus exclusive endpoints, holidays, and the Excel and Google Sheets functions.
Actualizado 2026-10-20
Esta guía está disponible en inglés por ahora; la traducción al español llegará pronto.
A business day is a weekday that is not a public holiday. Counting them sounds simple and goes wrong in three predictable places: the endpoints, the holidays and the weekend definition.
Endpoints
“Business days between Monday and Friday” is 4 if you count the days you have to wait, 5 if you count the days you have to work. Legal deadlines usually exclude the start day and include the end day; project schedules usually include both. Our Work Days Calculator shows the exclusive count by default and has a toggle to include the end date.
Holidays
Weekends are fixed; holidays are not. The US has 11 federal holidays; when one falls on a Saturday it is observed on Friday, on a Sunday it is observed on Monday. In 2026 Independence Day (July 4) is a Saturday, so the observed day is Friday July 3. States and employers add their own. The calculator loads public holidays by country from the open Nager.Date API and falls back to a built-in US list.
Excel
=NETWORKDAYS(start, end, holidays)Counts weekdays from start to end inclusive of both, excluding dates in the holidays range. For custom weekends (for example Friday and Saturday in the Gulf):
=NETWORKDAYS.INTL(start, end, 7, holidays)where 7 means Friday and Saturday off; “0000011” style strings also work, one character per day from Monday.
To find a date n business days ahead:
=WORKDAY(start, n, holidays)Google Sheets
Same three functions with the same arguments: NETWORKDAYS, NETWORKDAYS.INTL and WORKDAY.
Doing it by hand
Count full weeks between the dates (5 business days each), add the remaining weekdays, subtract holidays that fall on weekdays. From Monday 2 March 2026 to Friday 13 March 2026 inclusive: 2 full weeks minus nothing = 10 business days.
Edge cases
- Start after end: NETWORKDAYS returns a negative number; our calculator shows the direction.
- A holiday on a weekend: ignored, since the weekend already excluded it; make sure to use the observed date.
- Half days: not supported by any of these functions. Count them as full days or keep a separate list.
Worked examples
Shipping promise. An order placed Thursday 5 March 2026 ships in 3 business days. WORKDAY(5 March, 3) skips Saturday and Sunday and returns Tuesday 10 March. If Monday 9 March were a holiday in the holidays range, the answer moves to Wednesday 11 March.
Contract notice period. A 10-business-day notice served on Friday 20 November 2026 (US). Excluding the day of service, counting weekdays and skipping Thanksgiving (Thursday 26 November), the tenth business day is Monday 7 December. Counting Thanksgiving as a normal day gives Friday 4 December, a full working day earlier, which is the kind of difference that decides whether a filing is late.
Project duration. A task from Monday 1 June to Friday 26 June 2026 inclusive spans 4 weeks: NETWORKDAYS returns 20. Juneteenth (Friday 19 June) is a federal holiday, so with the holiday list the answer is 19.
Country differences
Weekend definitions vary: Israel takes Friday and Saturday, several Gulf states moved to Saturday and Sunday in 2022, and Nepal has a single Saturday weekend. NETWORKDAYS.INTL covers all of these with its weekend code. Public holidays differ by country and often by region within a country (Germany and Switzerland by state, Canada by province); the Nager.Date data our calculator uses marks regional holidays separately, and the calculator counts national ones by default.
Frequently asked
Does a half-day count? Not in any of these functions. If Christmas Eve is a half day, either count it as a full working day (conservative for deadlines) or keep a separate list and subtract 0.5 manually.
What about the day the count starts? The convention is that NETWORKDAYS includes both endpoints. For “days until”, most people want to exclude today. The calculator’s include-end toggle and its default of excluding the start day match the most common reading of “business days from now”.
How do I count business hours? Multiply business days by hours per day for whole days, then handle the partial first and last days by hand. Excel has no built-in business-hours function.