💼How many business days between two dates?

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A working-day count has two inputs that nobody writes down: which days of the week count as work, and whose holidays apply. Get either wrong and the answer is off by exactly as many days as you were trying to be precise about. Both are switches on this page rather than assumptions buried in the code.

Closed for whom? Banks, markets and the mail differ

There is no single American answer to “is today a business day”, because several different calendars share the name and they disagree. Federal offices and the Federal Reserve follow the eleven federal holidays. Banks broadly follow the Federal Reserve, which is why no ACH transfer or wire settles on a federal holiday. The Postal Service follows it too.

The stock exchanges do not. They keep their own schedule, which overlaps with the federal list but disagrees at both ends: they trade normally on Columbus Day and Veterans Day, and they close on Good Friday, which is not a federal holiday at all. The bond market keeps a third schedule again.

For most deadlines the federal list is the right one, because the question is whether an office, a bank or a court is open. If your deadline is a settlement date, check the market calendar instead.

The eleven US federal holidays, as rules

That federal list is defined as rules, not as dates, which is why any year can be worked out without maintaining a table. Six of the eleven are pinned to a weekday and can never fall on a weekend. The other five are fixed dates, and those are the ones that move when observed.

The moving five are why two calendars can disagree about the same year. The legal date never changes; what changes is the day offices close, and that is the day a working-day count has to skip.

Not every working week is Monday to Friday

The Monday-to-Friday week is a convention with real exceptions, and they are not marginal ones. Much of the Gulf and the eastern Mediterranean runs Sunday to Thursday, with Friday and Saturday as the weekend. Retail, hospitality and construction routinely run Monday to Saturday. Switching the working week changes the count and the weekend total together; the holiday list is a separate switch, because the two questions are independent.

What ten business days actually spans

From a weekday start, business days convert to calendar days on a fixed pattern, because five working days always occupy exactly one week.

Every public holiday inside the span adds one more calendar day, and starting on a Saturday or Sunday shortens it, because the counting only begins on the Monday. If you want the date rather than the length, the days from today calculator has business days as a unit and will land you on it directly.

To measure a span you already have both ends of in ordinary calendar days, use days between dates — it shows the Monday-to-Friday count alongside the total, without the holiday list. For a project measured in weeks rather than days, weeks between dates gives whole weeks plus the leftover, and for a shift measured to the minute the time duration calculator takes times of day as well as dates.