How Many Business Days in a Year

There are 250 business days in 2026: 261 weekdays minus 11 federal holidays, or 2,000 working hours at 8 hours a day.

The rule

A business day — or working day, the two mean the same here — is any Monday to Friday that is not a federal holiday. The holidays are the eleven legal public holidays of 5 U.S.C. §6103(a), and each is taken on the day it is observed: under §6103(b) and Executive Order 11582 a holiday that falls on a Saturday is observed on the Friday before it, and one that falls on a Sunday on the Monday after it. The Office of Personnel Management publishes the resulting dates every year; this calculator derives them by the same rule for any year from 1986, the first year Martin Luther King Jr. Day was observed.

How to count the business days of a period

1. Count the weekdays: a year has 52 full weeks, that is 260 weekdays, plus one or two extra days that add a weekday each when they fall on Monday to Friday.
2. Find each federal holiday's observed date and keep the ones inside the period — a holiday moved off a weekend always lands on a Friday or a Monday, so every one of them takes a weekday out.
3. Subtract: in 2026, 261 − 11 = 250 business days; multiply by 8 for working hours.

Business days by year

Twelve holidays in a year happen when New Year's Day of the next year falls on a Saturday and is observed on December 31; the year it belongs to then has ten.

The eleven federal holidays

• New Year's Day — January 1
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day — third Monday in January
• Washington's Birthday (Presidents' Day) — third Monday in February
• Memorial Day — last Monday in May
• Juneteenth National Independence Day — June 19, a federal holiday since 2021
• Independence Day — July 4
• Labor Day — first Monday in September
• Columbus Day — second Monday in October
• Veterans Day — November 11
• Thanksgiving Day — fourth Thursday in November
• Christmas Day — December 25

Six of them are set by weekday and always fall on a Monday or a Thursday. The five fixed dates — New Year's Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Veterans Day and Christmas Day — can land on a weekend, and then the observed day moves to the Friday before or the Monday after.

Where the count is used

• Payroll and salaried hours — the number of working days and hours in a month or year for pay-period and overtime planning.
• Deadlines “in business days” — contracts, court rules and agency procedures that count only working days.
• Shipping and processing times — carriers and government offices that do not work on federal holidays.
• Project and capacity planning — how many working days a quarter or a sprint actually has.
• Leave planning — which holidays make long weekends, and when a Saturday holiday gives a Friday off.

To count forward from today instead, use the business days from today calculator.

What the count does not include

Banks: the Federal Reserve closes on the same eleven holidays and moves a Sunday holiday to Monday, but it does not move a Saturday holiday to Friday — that Friday is an ordinary banking day, and banks are open on it. States: state holidays such as Cesar Chavez Day or Patriots' Day, and Inauguration Day in the Washington, D.C. area, are not counted. Schedules: the count assumes a Monday-to-Friday week; shift, part-time and weekend work are counted by their own schedules.