Published: 27 October 2026 · Updated: 27 October 2026
The year 2026 contains 261 weekdays — and the first quarter (1 January to 31 March 2026) contains 64 business days before public holidays. Enter any two dates below, add the public holidays inside your range, and get your exact working-day count instantly.
Business days are not calendar days: a "30-day" deadline is usually only 22 working days. That gap is where project plans, notice periods and invoice terms go wrong across Europe — the calculator below counts weekdays properly, and lets you strip out public holidays for your country.
Researched by MixKhazana Team · Last updated 27 October 2026 · Data: Calendar computation for 2026 (weekday counts verified day by day); public-holiday counts are user-entered because they vary by country and region
A business days calculator counts the working days between two dates — Monday to Friday in almost all of Europe — instead of plain calendar days. It is the tool behind notice periods, project timelines, delivery estimates, leave planning and payment terms: when a contract says "10 business days", it means 10 weekdays, skipping Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays. This calculator counts the weekdays in your range and subtracts the public holidays you enter, so the result matches your country rather than a generic guess. For simple date gaps without the working-day logic, see our days between dates calculator.
Answer-block fact: 2026 is a 365-day year starting on a Thursday, which gives it exactly 261 weekdays (52 full weeks of 5 weekdays, plus the extra Thursday, 1 January). December has the most weekdays of any 2026 month at 23, while February has the fewest at 20 — figures you can verify by counting any 2026 calendar day by day.
The formula is simple once stated: Business days = Weekdays in range − Public holidays in range. A weekday is any Monday-to-Friday date. The calculator walks every calendar date from your start date to your end date (including the end date unless you switch that off), counts the Mondays-to-Fridays, counts the weekend days separately for transparency, and subtracts the public-holiday number you entered. The result can never go below zero — if you enter more holidays than weekdays, the tool floors the answer at 0 rather than showing a negative count.
Why not bake holidays in automatically? Because Europe has no single holiday calendar. France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland all differ, and within Germany and Spain the regions differ too — Bavaria and Catalonia do not share a calendar. A tool that silently applied one country's holidays to another country's deadline would be confidently wrong. Entering your own holiday count keeps the answer honest for every European country.
A project runs from 1 January to 31 March 2026, and the team's country has 3 public holidays on weekdays inside that range:
The table below gives the weekday count for every month of 2026, before public holidays. Use it for quick planning — for example, a full-month project in July 2026 has 23 working days before holidays, while February has only 20. If you need salary or tax planning for the same period, our Germany salary calculator and Poland calculator cover the money side.
| Month 2026 | Weekdays | Month 2026 | Weekdays |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 22 | July | 23 |
| February | 20 | August | 21 |
| March | 22 | September | 22 |
| April | 22 | October | 22 |
| May | 21 | November | 21 |
| June | 22 | December | 23 |
| Full year 2026 | 261 | ||
A business day is normally any Monday-to-Friday date that is not a public holiday. Almost every European country uses a Saturday–Sunday weekend, so the calculator treats Monday to Friday as working days and lets you subtract public holidays separately. If your contract or employer uses a different weekend pattern, adjust the result by hand.
By default, yes — the end date is counted when it falls on a weekday. Some notice periods and contracts exclude the final day, so the tool offers a switch: set "Count the end date?" to No and the range ends the day before. Always check what your contract or employer's policy says, because this one-day difference changes deadlines.
Because public holidays vary by country and region across Europe. Germany's holidays differ by state, Spain's by autonomous community, and France, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland each have their own calendars. A fixed built-in list would be wrong for most users, so the tool counts weekdays exactly and subtracts the holiday number you confirm from your official 2026 calendar.
2026 has 261 weekdays before public holidays, because it is a 365-day year starting on a Thursday. After subtracting your country's public holidays — typically 10 to 15 weekdays depending on the country and region — a full working year lands around 246 to 251 business days. Enter 1 January to 31 December 2026 in the calculator with your holiday count for your exact figure.
In everyday European use they mean the same thing: Monday-to-Friday days excluding public holidays. "Working day" is the more common phrase in British and Irish contracts, while "business day" dominates in banking and international contracts, where it can also exclude days when banks are closed. For most planning purposes the two terms are interchangeable.
Yes, with one caution: some contracts define business days as days when banks are open in a specific city, which can exclude extra days beyond public holidays. For employment notice periods, your contract or collective agreement usually defines the count — use this calculator for the weekday math, then confirm any bank-holiday or company-closure days your contract adds.
Yes. The tool counts real calendar dates, so in a leap year like 2028 it automatically includes 29 February when it falls inside your range. February 2028 will have 21 weekdays instead of 2026's 20, and the full leap year will have 262 weekdays instead of 261. You never need to adjust for leap years by hand.
Enter any start and end date, even across a year boundary — the calculator walks every date in the range, so a range like 15 December 2026 to 15 January 2027 works exactly. Just remember to add the public holidays from both years' calendars, since a cross-year range spans two different holiday lists.