Time off is counted in working days, and what counts as a working day depends on the calendar, the weekend your business keeps and the holidays you observe. The working days calculator in this group answers those questions for a US employer. It counts the business days between two dates, adds or subtracts a number of business days from a date, and treats the federal holidays as days off by default.
That default is the useful part. A general calendar tool asks you to pick a country and then a list of holidays. This one starts from the eleven US federal holidays, lets you add or remove days for your own business, and lets you switch the weekend for a workplace that is open on Saturday or closed on Friday. State holidays can be added as an option. Whatever you choose, the page lists which days it skipped, so you can check the count against your own calendar.
Employers use a count like this in several ordinary situations. An employee asks for a week away and you want to know how many working days that uses. A notice period runs for ten working days and you need the last day. A payroll cut-off falls a set number of business days before pay day and you want to know the date. A pay period has a number of working days in it and you want to compare two months. The tool has presets for pay period length and for days to a deadline so the common cases take a click.
A word on what this group does not yet cover. Many employers also need to calculate how paid time off builds up, hour by hour or pay period by pay period, and what an employee’s balance is. That depends on a written policy that the employer sets, and on state rules about whether accrued time is paid out when someone leaves. A calculator for accrual is not part of this site yet, and this page will not pretend otherwise. When it is built it will go in this group and will take its rules from your policy and from your state’s labor department.
Federal law does not require private employers to give paid vacation, sick days or holidays. Whether and how much paid time off an employee gets is set by the employer’s policy or agreement, and some states and cities do require paid sick leave. Because of that, a working days count tells you about the calendar and nothing about entitlement. Your policy, your contract and your state law decide what an employee is owed.
Dates are counted on your own device and nothing you enter is uploaded. The page shows the version of the federal holiday list it used, the date that list was checked, and the source it follows. If an observed holiday moves because it falls on a weekend, the tool shows the observed day rather than the calendar date, and says so in the list of skipped days.