Add Business Days to Date in Excel

What this does

NETWORKDAYS counts whole working days between two dates. It includes both the start and end date, automatically skips every Saturday and Sunday, and skips any dates you pass in the optional holidays range as well. It is the standard way to work out delivery times, project durations or how many billable days fall in a period. If your week does not run Monday to Friday — say a Sunday-to-Thursday week — use NETWORKDAYS.INTL, which adds a weekend-pattern argument so you can define which days count as the weekend. Most people learn this as a sequence of clicks and forget it by next week; learning it as a pattern instead is what lets you apply it to the next, slightly different version of the problem without starting from scratch. That is the difference this page is trying to make. Treat “add business days to date in excel” as a small repeatable workflow rather than a one-off click you hope to remember next time. Use a small test block before the live file, so any surprise in the affected cells shows up while it is still harmless. When a formula is involved, keep the inputs labelled beside it, reference cells instead of typing values, and apply number formatting only after the result checks out. That turns a layout choice that keeps the sheet readable and sortable into a method you can reuse, explain, and defend when the workbook leaves your screen.

A worked example

A task starts on 01/06/2026 (a Monday) in A2 and is due 12/06/2026 (a Friday) in B2. =NETWORKDAYS(A2, B2) returns 10 — the two full weeks of weekdays, with the weekend of the 6th and 7th excluded. If 05/06/2026 is a public holiday listed in D2, then =NETWORKDAYS(A2, B2, D2) returns 9, dropping that one day too. NETWORKDAYS is the right tool for SLAs, project timelines and billing, where only Monday-to-Friday working days count and weekends and holidays must drop out automatically. One habit worth forming early: name the cells that hold your inputs, so the formula reads in plain language instead of a string of cell addresses. A reviewer — or you in three months — can then follow the logic without decoding what B7 and D2 were supposed to mean, which is most of what makes a sheet maintainable.

In Google Sheets

If you are in Google Sheets rather than Excel, the good news is that the formula shown here is identical and the workflow barely changes — menus sit across the top instead of in a ribbon, and a few function names differ slightly, but anything you build here moves across with little or no rework. Nothing on this page is behind a login: the tool runs entirely in your browser, the formula is shown in full with one-click copy, and the steps work the same on Windows and Mac. That is the whole promise here — the exact answer, a way to prove it on your own numbers, and just enough context to make it stick. Treat “add business days to date in excel” as a small building block rather than a chore. Once the inputs sit in their own cells and the formula reads from them, the same setup answers a dozen related questions with a tweak, and Excel keeps every dependent figure current as the data changes. The tool above is there so you can rehearse and verify before committing anything to a real workbook; the steps and worked example are there so the logic sticks. Get it right once and it stops costing you time — it starts saving it, every time the question comes back around.

Common mistakes

• Expecting the result to exclude the start date — NETWORKDAYS counts both endpoints, so a Monday-to-Friday span is 5, not 4.
• Leaving holidays out and over-counting across public holidays; pass a holiday range as the third argument to drop them.
• Using NETWORKDAYS for a non-Monday-to-Friday week — it always treats Saturday and Sunday as the weekend, so use NETWORKDAYS.INTL for other patterns.

Frequently asked questions