How to Count Business Days Between Two Dates (Holidays Included)

Calendar days, business days and banking days

"I'll deliver in 5 days" sounds simple until someone asks: five days of what? The confusion is built in, because legal and commercial language uses three different counts, and each one lands on a different date.

• Calendar days: everything counts — Monday through Sunday, holiday or not. This is the raw calendar. Contract terms, penalties and most tax and labor-law deadlines run on calendar days.
• Business days: only Monday to Friday, and you still drop any holiday that lands on a weekday. This is how company SLAs, delivery windows and court deadlines are usually counted.
• Banking days: business days under the financial-market calendar. On top of weekends and national holidays, it also removes Carnival Monday and Tuesday and the morning of Ash Wednesday — dates when Brazilian banks don't clear payments. That's why a wire scheduled for the Friday before Carnival only settles the following Thursday.

The difference is not academic. Over a 10-day window that catches one holiday and two weekends, "calendar days" and "business days" can land a full week apart. Before any math, decide which of the three counts your deadline actually uses.

How to exclude Saturdays and Sundays

Counting business days is, at heart, counting calendar days and then throwing out what doesn't count. The skeleton of the algorithm has three steps:

1. Count the calendar days between the two dates (mind whether the count is inclusive or exclusive — more on that below).
2. Subtract the Saturdays and Sundays in the range.
3. Subtract the holidays that fall on a weekday (a holiday on a Saturday subtracts nothing, because that Saturday already left in step 2).

For weekends there's a shortcut that saves you from walking the calendar day by day. Every full week has exactly 5 business days. So in a span of D days, take D ÷ 7: the whole-number part is the complete weeks, worth 5 business days each; then you adjust the leftover stretch based on the weekday the span starts on.

A quick example: from Monday to the following Friday is 11 calendar days. One full week (7 days) gives 5 business days; the remaining 4 days (Monday to Thursday) are also business days — 9 business days inside 11 calendar days. Drop one holiday in the middle and it falls to 8. That back-and-forth is exactly what the Business Days Calculator settles in one click: you give it two dates and it strips out weekends and national holidays for you. For the common "how long until a deadline" case, Working Days Until Date counts from today to the target date.

The problem of moving holidays (Carnival, Easter, Corpus Christi)

Fixed-date holidays are easy: every December 25 is Christmas. The trouble is the moving holidays, which shift each year because they hang off Easter — and Easter hangs off the Moon. Under the Gregorian rule, it falls on the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after March 21. Working that out by hand needs the computus (the Gauss Easter algorithm); in practice, nobody does it in their head.

What matters is that once you know Easter's date, every other moving holiday comes out by simple arithmetic:

Not every "long weekend" is a national holiday

Here's a trap that breaks a lot of spreadsheets. At the federal level, Carnival and Corpus Christi are not national holidays — they're optional days off (ponto facultativo). When they're a true holiday, it's usually the state or the city that decrees it (Rio de Janeiro, for instance, makes Carnival a municipal holiday). Good Friday, on the other hand, is a national religious holiday. So a calculator that follows only the federal calendar may count Corpus Christi as a working day while your city is shut.

The fixed-date national holidays are: January 1 (New Year), April 21 (Tiradentes), May 1 (Labor Day), September 7 (Independence Day), October 12 (Our Lady of Aparecida), November 2 (All Souls' Day), November 15 (Proclamation of the Republic), November 20 (Black Awareness Day — national since 2024, under Law 14,759/2023) and December 25 (Christmas). Add to those the municipal ones — city anniversaries, patron saints — that no national list carries. The Brazilian Holidays page shows the year's calendar with the moving dates already worked out.

Business-day deadlines in court

Since Brazil's 2015 Code of Civil Procedure, procedural deadlines counted in days run only on business days (Article 219). Before that, lawyers counted calendar days and lost weekends inside the clock. The rule covers procedural deadlines; deadlines under substantive law (a contractual penalty, say) still run on calendar days.

Two more rules round it out: you exclude the start day and include the due day (Article 224); and if the start or the end lands on a day with no court session, it pushes to the next business day. There's also a court recess from December 20 to January 20, during which deadlines are suspended.

A full example, with a holiday in the middle

Picture a 10-business-day deadline that starts counting on Monday, April 14, 2025. The count ignores the 14th (the start day) and begins on the 15th. Watch the damage two holidays do:

• April 15, 16, 17 (Tue, Wed, Thu) → business days 1, 2 and 3.
• April 18 (Fri) → Good Friday, doesn't count.
• April 19 and 20 (Sat and Sun) → don't count.
• April 21 (Mon) → Tiradentes, doesn't count.
• April 22–25 (Tue–Fri) → business days 4, 5, 6 and 7.
• April 28, 29, 30 (Mon, Tue, Wed) → business days 8, 9 and 10.

The tenth business day lands on April 30, 2025. In calendar days, 10 days starting from the 15th would end on April 24 — a six-day gap, the product of two holidays and two weekends crammed into the window. This is the kind of count where missing one holiday means missing a deadline. To check the raw span between two dates, the Date Difference Calculator and the Day Counter give the total calendar days, and the business-days calculator handles the holiday deductions.

Frequently asked questions

Does Saturday count as a business day?

For a business-day count, no — a business day is Monday through Friday. But watch out in retail and under Brazilian labor law, where Saturday is often a "non-worked business day": it counts toward paid weekly rest and toward notice periods, even if the shop stays closed. Always check which rule your contract or regulation uses.

Why does Carnival move every year?

Because it's tied to Easter, which is itself movable. Carnival Tuesday falls 47 days before Easter, and Easter depends on the first full moon after the March equinox. As a result, Carnival can land anywhere from early February to early March, depending on the year.

If a holiday falls on Sunday, do I get the Monday off?

In Brazil there's no automatic rule to "roll" a holiday to the following Monday (that's common in the UK, not here). If the holiday lands on a weekend, it simply doesn't remove an extra business day — Saturday and Sunday weren't business days anyway. For your count, a Sunday holiday is neutral: it subtracts nothing.

Does the calculator account for state and city holidays?

The tools work with the national-holiday calendar, including the moving dates tied to Easter. State and municipal holidays (city anniversaries, patron saints, regional dates) vary from place to place and don't fit a national list. If your deadline is local, check your city's official calendar and subtract those days separately.