Business Days Calculator

What counts as a business day in the United States

In the US, a business day is any Monday through Friday that is not one of the eleven federal holidays. Saturdays and Sundays are never business days, and neither is New Year's Day, Independence Day or Christmas. This is the calendar banks, the Federal Reserve and the US Postal Service run on, and it is the calendar most contracts mean when they say "within 30 business days."

The calculator above counts the weekdays in your range and then, when the holiday option is on, removes the federal holidays too. Because the floating holidays move every year, it computes the correct weekday for each holiday for the years your range touches, so you get the right count whether your span sits inside one year or crosses from December into January.

The 11 US federal holidays and when they fall

Federal law (5 U.S.C. 6103) establishes eleven public holidays. Some are fixed to a date; the rest float to a specific weekday. Here is the full list with the 2026 dates.

Two things to note. Washington's Birthday is the legal name even though most people call it Presidents' Day. And Juneteenth National Independence Day became the eleventh federal holiday in 2021, so tools that still list only ten holidays are out of date. The official list is published each year by the US Office of Personnel Management, and the underlying statute is 5 U.S.C. 6103.

The observed rule: what happens when a holiday falls on a weekend

When a fixed-date holiday lands on a weekend, federal offices, banks and the markets observe it on the nearest weekday instead. The rule is simple and worth memorising:

• Falls on a Saturday → observed the Friday before.
• Falls on a Sunday → observed the Monday after.

Real examples: January 1, 2022 was a Saturday, so it was observed on Friday, December 31, 2021. July 4, 2026 is a Saturday, so it is observed on Friday, July 3, 2026. December 25, 2027 is a Saturday, so it is observed on Friday, December 24, 2027.

Floating holidays never need the observed rule, because they are already pinned to a weekday by definition, the third Monday of January cannot fall on a weekend. This calculator applies the observed rule automatically, which is what keeps a range that crosses a weekend New Year's correct.

Floating holidays: the Monday and Thursday rules

Six of the eleven federal holidays do not have a fixed date, they are defined by a weekday within a month. That is why the count of business days shifts from year to year even when the number of holidays stays the same.

• Martin Luther King Jr. Day, third Monday of January
• Washington's Birthday, third Monday of February
• Memorial Day, last Monday of May
• Labor Day, first Monday of September
• Columbus Day, second Monday of October
• Thanksgiving Day, fourth Thursday of November

Because all six land on a weekday, they always remove a working day from the count, unlike a fixed holiday such as Christmas, which removes a business day only when it does not fall on a weekend.

Worked example: a Net 30 business-day payment term

An invoice is dated Friday, January 2, 2026, with terms of "Net 30 business days," and the start date is not counted. When is it due?

• Counting forward from the next business day, and skipping weekends and the federal holidays (New Year's Day on Jan 1 and MLK Day on Monday, Jan 19), the 30th business day lands on Tuesday, February 17, 2026.
• Thirty business days is about six calendar weeks, so without the MLK holiday you would have landed a day earlier, the holiday pushes the due date out by one working day.

That is the whole point of counting business days: a "30-day" term is closer to 42 calendar days, and one floating holiday can move a payment or a shipping deadline by a full working day. Get the convention wrong, count the start date, or forget the holiday, and you can be a day late on a deadline that mattered.

How many business days in a month or a year?

A typical month has 20 to 23 business days, and a typical year has about 250 once the weekends and the eleven federal holidays are removed. As it happens, 2025, 2026 and 2027 each work out to exactly 250 business days, the different holiday weekdays happen to cancel out across those years.

February is usually the shortest at around 20 business days, while months like January and October often reach 22 or 23. A leap year adds one calendar day but only adds a business day if February 29 falls on a weekday. When you are budgeting working hours, 21 business days per month and 250 per year are safe planning figures.

One quick sanity check: 52 weeks × 5 weekdays is 260 weekdays a year. Remove the eleven federal holidays, but add back any that land on a weekend, since those remove no weekday, and you settle at about 250. In 2026, for example, Independence Day falls on a Saturday, so it takes out no working day at all, which is why 2026 still totals 250 despite having the full set of holidays.

Why weekends and holidays matter for money and shipping

Business-day counting is not trivia, it is how a lot of money and logistics work:

• Banking and ACH, the Federal Reserve is closed on federal holidays, so no wire transfers or ACH settlements move on those days. A payment "sent" on a holiday waits until the next business day.
• Postal and courier delivery, the USPS observes federal holidays, so there is no mail delivery and many couriers pause their schedules too.
• Payroll and invoicing, pay dates, discount periods and late fees are often defined in business days, not calendar days.
• Contracts and deadlines, "business days" excludes weekends and holidays by definition, which can add a week or more to a nominal term.

Before you commit to a date, confirm whether the agreement means calendar days or business days, and whether the start date counts. Those two choices move the deadline more than anything else. The Federal Reserve publishes its own bank holiday schedule, which follows the same eleven days.