FormulaDates

Count working days between two dates

Count the business days between a start and end date, excluding weekends and an optional list of holidays, for deadlines and SLAs.

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Your formula

=NETWORKDAYS(B2, C2, Holidays!A2:A15)

Works in both Excel and Google Sheets unless the fine print below says otherwise.

Why it's built this way

  • NETWORKDAYS counts Monday-to-Friday dates between the two bounds, INCLUSIVE of both the start and end date, treating Saturday and Sunday as automatically excluded.
  • The third argument subtracts any date in that range from the count if it would otherwise have counted as a workday — that's how a public holiday landing on a Tuesday stops being counted.
  • When the default Saturday/Sunday weekend doesn't match a team's actual schedule, NETWORKDAYS.INTL takes a weekend pattern as an extra argument — the escape hatch this plain version doesn't have.

The fine print

  • The holidays argument is optional — drop it (and the trailing comma) for a plain weekday count — but if supplied, every cell in that range needs an actual date value, not text that merely looks like one.
  • Both endpoints count as workdays when they fall Monday to Friday, which makes the result one day higher than an "end minus start" gap would suggest — easy to be off by one against a naive count.
  • Works identically in Excel and Google Sheets, including the optional third argument.

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