Working Days Calculator UK
Add or subtract working days from any date. Accounts for UK bank holidays in England & Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.
Use a negative number to count backwards.
Enter a date and a number of working days.
How this calculator works
A working day in the UK is any weekday — Monday to Friday — that is not also a public bank holiday. This is the calendar most contracts, employment notice periods, payment terms, and court deadlines run on.
Bank holidays differ by region. England & Wales observes eight, Scotland nine, and Northern Ireland ten. When a bank holiday falls at a weekend, gov.uk allocates a substitute day on the following Monday (or Tuesday) — this calculator applies those substitutes automatically.
All calculations run in UTC to avoid daylight-saving edge cases. The underlying bank holiday data comes from the official gov.uk bank holidays feed.
Worked examples
Three quick scenarios showing how the calculator handles weekends and bank holidays. Try them in the tool above.
Add 10 working days to a start date
A task is handed over on Monday 16 March 2026 and the brief allows 10 working days to deliver.
- Question
- What is the delivery deadline?
- Answer
- Monday, 30 March 2026
- Why
- Counting starts the day after handover and skips the two weekends in the span. No bank holidays fall in this window, so 10 working days lands two clear weeks later.
Count across the Easter cluster
A request arrives on Tuesday 31 March 2026, with a 5-working-day turnaround. Good Friday (3 April) and Easter Monday (6 April) sit in the way.
- Question
- When is it due?
- Answer
- Thursday, 9 April 2026
- Why
- Both Easter bank holidays are skipped along with the weekend, pushing the deadline noticeably further out than five calendar days would suggest.
Work backwards from a fixed deadline
A report must be filed by Friday 29 May 2026 and needs 8 working days of lead time.
- Question
- What is the latest day to start?
- Answer
- Monday, 18 May 2026
- Why
- Subtracting 8 working days steps back over the weekends and the Spring bank holiday (25 May) to show the last safe start date.
Other calculators
Days between two dates
Working days, weekends, and calendar days between any two UK dates.
How many working days in 2026?
Annual and monthly working day counts for every UK region.
UK bank holidays 2026
Every bank holiday for E&W, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.
Business days calculator
The same calculator, framed for contracts and payment terms.
Holiday pay calculator ↗
Sister site for UK holiday entitlement and pay under the 2024 regulations.
Common use cases
HR & employment
Notice periods, probationary periods, return-to-work dates, and SLA tracking for employee relations cases. Notice periods running in working days protect both employee and employer from weekends silently extending the period.
Legal practice
Service of documents, deemed-served deadlines, and court directions almost always run in working days. Conveyancing exchanges and completions are tracked in working days when there are bank holidays in between.
Finance & accounts payable
Net 30 working days is a common payment term. Bacs payments take three working days to clear, CHAPS settles same day. Use the calculator to project payment receipt dates and chase overdue invoices accurately.
Project management & construction
Construction programmes typically work in working days. Plan around bank holidays, especially the Easter and August clusters where two long weekends can compress a sprint or trade window.
Public sector & FOI
Freedom of Information requests run on 20 working days. Subject Access Requests under UK GDPR run on calendar days but practitioners often track both.
Frequently asked questions
What is a working day in the UK?+
A working day in the UK is normally a weekday (Monday to Friday) that is not also a public bank holiday. Saturdays and Sundays do not count as working days for most legal, payroll, and contractual purposes.
Do bank holidays count as working days?+
No. Bank holidays are non-working days for most employers, courts, and contracts. This calculator excludes them by default. You can change the region (England & Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) because the dates and the set of holidays differ.
Is Saturday a working day in the UK?+
Not in the standard definition used for things like SLAs, payment terms, contract deadlines, and employment notice periods. Some industries (retail, hospitality) operate on Saturdays, but the legal and commercial default treats Saturday and Sunday as non-working days.
How many working days are in a year?+
It depends on the year and the region. England & Wales typically has 252–254 working days, Scotland slightly fewer due to extra holidays (St Andrew's Day, 2nd January), and Northern Ireland fewer still (St Patrick's Day, Battle of the Boyne). See our year-by-year breakdowns for exact counts.
When are UK bank holidays in 2026?+
England & Wales has eight: New Year's Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Early May (4 May), Spring (25 May), Summer (31 Aug), Christmas Day, and the Boxing Day substitute (28 Dec). Scotland and Northern Ireland have additional dates. See the bank holiday pages for the full list per region.
Are bank holidays different in Scotland?+
Yes. Scotland does not observe Easter Monday but adds 2nd January and St Andrew's Day. The Summer bank holiday is the first Monday in August in Scotland (rather than the last Monday in England & Wales). Pick "Scotland" in the region selector to use the correct dates.
How do I calculate Net 30 working days?+
Use the calculator above. Enter the invoice or trigger date as the start date, enter 30 in the working days field, and pick the region whose calendar applies to the obligation. The result is the date by which payment or action is due.
Does this calculator include public holidays for Northern Ireland?+
Yes. Selecting Northern Ireland adds St Patrick's Day (17 March) and Battle of the Boyne (12 July) on top of the standard UK bank holidays, with substitute days applied automatically when these fall at a weekend.
Is there a legal right to take bank holidays off?+
No. There is no automatic statutory right to bank holidays off work, and no automatic right to extra pay for working them. Whether you get them off, and whether they count towards your 5.6 weeks of statutory annual leave, depends on your contract. ACAS has detailed guidance on how bank holidays interact with holiday entitlement.
Why do calculations run in UTC?+
Working with UTC dates avoids a class of off-by-one bugs that appear around the spring and autumn clock changes, when a naive local-time calculation can shift a result by a day. Bank holidays are whole calendar days, so the time zone never changes which day a deadline lands on here.