How Many Working Days Are in a Year?
A calendar year has 365 or 366 days, but only a portion of them are working days. Once you take out weekends — and then the public holidays that fall on a weekday — the number that is left is what payroll, project plans, and leave calculations actually run on. For most people and most countries that number lands close to 250.
The quick answer
In a common year there are usually 261 weekdays (Monday to Friday); in some years it is 260 or 262, depending on which day the year starts and whether it is a leap year. Subtract the public holidays that land on a weekday — often around 8 to 12 — and you are left with roughly 250 working days in a typical year.
How the weekday count works
A year is a little more than 52 whole weeks: 52 × 7 = 364, leaving one spare day in a common year and two in a leap year. Fifty-two weeks give exactly 52 × 5 = 260 weekdays. The spare day (or two) then adds one or two more, depending on which weekday they fall on. That is why the weekday total shifts between 260 and 262 from year to year — the calendar does not divide evenly into weeks.
Subtracting public holidays
Weekends are the same everywhere, but public holidays are not. A holiday only reduces the working-day total when it falls on a weekday — a holiday that lands on a Saturday or Sunday was not a working day anyway. Most countries have somewhere between 8 and 15 national holidays, so a realistic working-day count for a full year is usually in the 248 to 253 range.
Why the exact number changes every year
Three things move the figure: which weekday 1 January falls on (it decides where that spare day lands), whether it is a leap year (which adds a second spare day), and how many holidays happen to fall on weekends that year. Because movable holidays like Easter shift around, even the same country's working-day total is rarely identical two years running.
Counting working days for your own dates
Rather than estimating, you can count the exact number for any range. Our working days calculator counts the business days between two dates, skipping weekends and the public holidays for your country. To go the other way — "what date is 20 working days from now?" — the add business days calculator steps forward past weekends and holidays for you, and the weekend calculator counts just the Saturdays and Sundays in a span.