Count the working days between two dates, or add and subtract business days from one. US federal holidays are computed from the statutory rules rather than a fixed table, so the answer stays correct for any year. Everything runs in your browser — the dates you type are never sent anywhere.
The starting date is never counted as day one. Three business days from a Monday is the Thursday of that week.
Business day calculator by Widgetbench
This is the single most common source of a missed deadline, and it is not a rounding error — it moves the answer by a full working day. “Within 10 business days” on a notice sent Monday can mean the Monday two weeks later or the Friday before it, depending on whether the day of sending counts. Different bodies genuinely use different conventions, and no calculator can tell you which one applies to your document. What this one does instead is make the choice explicit and show you both ends of the range it actually counted, so the assumption is visible rather than buried.
A useful rule of thumb: when a period is expressed as “X business days from” a date, the starting date is normally excluded and you are looking for a resulting date — use the second mode above. When it is expressed as “X business days between” two known dates, you are counting, and you need to decide about both ends.
When a federal holiday lands on a Saturday, federal offices do not simply lose it. Under 5 U.S.C. §6103(b)(1), for employees whose basic workweek is Monday through Friday, “Instead of a holiday that occurs on a Saturday, the Friday immediately before is a legal public holiday.” So the closure lands on the preceding Friday — a day that looks like an ordinary working day on any wall calendar.
A holiday falling on a Sunday moves the other way. Executive Order 11582, section 3(a), provides that an employee whose basic workweek excludes Sunday “shall be excused from work on the next workday of his basic workweek” — in practice, the following Monday.
Independence Day 2026 is the live example: 4 July 2026 is a Saturday, so the federal closure is Friday 3 July. A count that treats 3 July as a normal working day is one day out.
Banks stay open on the Friday before a Saturday holiday. The Federal Reserve states it plainly: “For holidays falling on Saturday, Federal Reserve Banks and Branches will be open the preceding Friday; however, the Board of Governors will be closed.” For Sunday holidays the two agree — “For holidays falling on Sunday, all Federal Reserve offices will be closed the following Monday.”
This matters because most consumer deadlines expressed in business days are banking deadlines, not federal-office deadlines. A refund promised “within 10 business days”, an ACH settlement window, or a funds-availability hold follows the calendar the banks keep. Switching the holiday setting above between the two calendars shows exactly which dates the disagreement affects — and in a year like 2026, with Independence Day on a Saturday, it changes the answer.
Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Reserve Bank holiday schedule.
This calculator stores no list of dates. Each holiday is derived from the rule Congress wrote, so it is correct for years that have not happened yet and cannot silently go stale.
| Holiday | Statutory rule — 5 U.S.C. §6103(a) |
|---|---|
| New Year's Day | January 1 |
| Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. | The third Monday in January |
| Washington's Birthday | The third Monday in February |
| Memorial Day | The last Monday in May |
| Juneteenth National Independence Day | June 19 |
| Independence Day | July 4 |
| Labor Day | The first Monday in September |
| Columbus Day | The second Monday in October |
| Veterans Day | November 11 |
| Thanksgiving Day | The fourth Thursday in November |
| Christmas Day | December 25 |
Text of the holiday list as published at Cornell Law School's US Code. Verified 2026-08-02.
Generated in your browser from the rules above when this page loaded — not fetched, and not typed in by hand. The observed column is the day the closure actually falls on under the calendar selected in the tool.
No. The calculation is a few hundred lines of JavaScript that run in the page. There is no request to any API, no form submission, and no storage of what you type. The only network request this page makes after loading is a single one-pixel image that records that the page was viewed and, separately, that the calculator was used at all — it carries no dates, no inputs and no identifier. You can confirm all of this in your browser's network tab.
Because 4 July 2026 falls on a Saturday, and 5 U.S.C. §6103(b)(1) moves the holiday for Monday-to-Friday federal employees to “the Friday immediately before”. Under the banking option it stays a working day, because the Federal Reserve Banks are open that Friday. Both answers are correct for their own calendar, which is why the tool asks you which one you mean.
Nothing breaks — a non-working start or end date simply is not counted as a business day. When it happens the result notes it and tells you the first business day on or after that date, since that is usually the date a period is actually treated as running from.
No, and that is a deliberate design decision rather than luck. Whole calendar dates are handled as integer day counts in UTC, never as local timestamps. A tool that adds 24-hour spans to a local time will produce an off-by-one result around a clock change, because the day the clocks go forward is 23 hours long. Here, days are days.
Yes, and no permission or attribution deal is needed. See the embed snippet below. The embedded version strips the surrounding article and keeps a small credit link. It loads no third-party code into your page beyond this one iframe.
No. It is arithmetic over a calendar. Where a statute, contract or rule of procedure defines how days are counted for your situation, that definition governs and may differ from every option offered here.
Every calculation updates the address bar, so the link in it reproduces exactly what is on screen — dates, mode, weekend, holiday calendar and your own closures included. That link can be pasted into a ticket or an email and it will open on the same answer.
To put the calculator on another page, use an iframe pointing at the same URL with embed=1 added:
<iframe src="https://widgetbench.com/tools/business-days?embed=1"
width="100%" height="620" style="border:1px solid #243050;border-radius:14px"
title="Business day calculator"></iframe>Any of the link parameters can be added to preset the embedded copy — for example ?embed=1&mode=add&n=30&calendar=banking.
