BUSINESS DAY CALCULATOR

Most U.S. rules that say "within 10 business days" start counting from the next working day, not the day the clock was triggered. That's the convention this tool uses: it begins counting the first business day after your start date. If a specific contract or court rule counts the start day itself, subtract one from your result — and when the wording is unclear, give yourself the earlier date.

This calculator skips the eleven U.S. federal holidays, which is what banks, courts and government deadlines usually follow. But your employer, shipping carrier or state office may close on different days — the Friday after Thanksgiving, Good Friday, or a state holiday — and may stay open on some federal ones. Check the specific calendar that governs your deadline before you rely on the count.

When a fixed-date holiday like July 4 or December 25 lands on a Saturday, federal offices take the Friday before off; when it lands on a Sunday, they take the Monday after. That shifted weekday — not the calendar date of the holiday — is the day that actually pushes a working-day deadline out. This tool already accounts for those observed shifts, which is exactly where hand-counting tends to go wrong.

A deadline is only useful if it's somewhere you'll see it. Once you have the date, our free reminder tool drops it into your own calendar as a Google Calendar event or an iCal file, created entirely in your browser. Need the plain gap between two dates instead of a working-day count? Use the days between dates calculator.

A "business day" for a bank means a day it is open for substantially all its banking functions — which excludes weekends and federal holidays, but also anything after that day's cut-off time. Submit a transfer at 6 PM and it is processed on the next banking day, so a "three business day" transfer initiated on a Friday evening before a Monday holiday can easily settle the following Friday. ACH transfers, cheque holds and wire deadlines all run on this clock. Home purchases live on this clock too: the wire that funds a closing has to land on a banking day, which is why a Friday closing before a holiday weekend is the one that slips. If you are working out what the payment on that loan would be, our mortgage payment calculator runs the numbers. When money has to arrive by a date, count backwards from it rather than forwards from today, and give yourself one day of slack for the cut-off.

Carrier transit estimates are counted in business days from the day a parcel is picked up, not the day you click buy — and warehouse handling time sits in front of that. So "2-day shipping" ordered Friday afternoon typically means pickup Monday and delivery Wednesday. Saturday delivery is a paid add-on with most carriers rather than a default, and holiday weeks compress capacity well beyond the holiday itself. If a gift or document has to land on a specific date, work back from it: this calculator subtracts working days as readily as it adds them.

Legal deadlines are where working-day counting gets genuinely technical. Many U.S. procedural rules count all calendar days for periods of 11 days or more, but exclude weekends and holidays for shorter periods — so a 7-day deadline and a 14-day deadline are counted by different methods. Most also extend a deadline that would land on a weekend or holiday to the next business day, and some add days when service was by mail. Consumer lending has its own version: under the federal Truth in Lending Act you get a three-business-day right to cancel after refinancing a mortgage on your own home, and Sundays and federal holidays do not count toward those three days — so the money is not disbursed until the window closes. Working out whether that refinance is worth doing in the first place is what our mortgage refinance calculator is for. The tool above gives you a clean federal-holiday-aware count; for anything filed with a court, read the governing rule and treat this figure as a cross-check rather than an answer.

The eleven federal holidays are a government schedule, not a national closure. Private employers commonly add the Friday after Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, frequently skip Columbus Day and Veterans Day entirely, and vary widely on Juneteenth. Financial markets follow yet another calendar — the NYSE observes Good Friday, which is not a federal holiday at all, and closes early on a handful of days. State offices add their own. Before a working-day count matters commercially, get the specific calendar that governs it; the checkbox above lets you include or exclude federal holidays so you can model either case.

The useful planning constant: a year holds about 261 weekdays, minus eleven federal holidays, leaving roughly 250 — and once typical paid leave comes out, an individual's genuinely available days land nearer 225. That figure is what makes daily-rate maths work. A contractor's annual equivalent is the day rate times about 250, not 365; a project needing 60 person-days is twelve working weeks, not two months. Combine it with days between dates for a span in both units, or week numbers when the plan runs on a weekly cycle.