Excel WORKDAY Function

What this does

WORKDAY returns the date a given number of working days from a start date, skipping Saturdays, Sundays and any holidays you list. It is the counterpart to NETWORKDAYS, which counts the days between two dates rather than projecting forward. The holidays argument is what makes it trustworthy in practice: without a holiday range it will happily land a deadline on Christmas Day. Its sibling WORKDAY.INTL takes a weekend-pattern argument, which matters for regions where the weekend is not Saturday and Sunday. 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. For “excel workday function”, the reliable version is a short checking loop, not just the first command that appears to work. Run it on a deliberately small range first, watch how the affected formula change, and only then apply the same setup to the full sheet. 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 is what makes a calculation you can defend to a CFO or an auditor useful in real work: repeatable, auditable, and not dependent on memory or luck.

A worked example

A ten-working-day SLA from a ticket date, with public holidays listed in H2:H20: =WORKDAY(A2, 10, $H$2:$H$20). Counting backwards to find when work must start: =WORKDAY(deadline, -5, $H$2:$H$20). A Friday-Saturday weekend: =WORKDAY.INTL(A2, 10, 7, $H$2:$H$20). WORKDAY turns an SLA or lead time into a real calendar date, which is the number a customer actually gets told. A practical tip before you scale it up: build it once on a small block of test data, confirm the number against the tool on this page, and only then point it at your real sheet. That one habit catches almost every mistake while it is still cheap to fix, long before a wrong figure reaches a report or a colleague.

In Google Sheets

Everything above works in Google Sheets too. Excel and Sheets share the formula syntax used here; only the surrounding menus are arranged differently. That portability is deliberate — learn it once and it follows you between the two tools and across Windows and Mac. 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. If you take one thing from this page on “excel workday function”, make it the habit rather than the keystrokes: set the problem up with labelled inputs, reference those cells, and let Excel do the recomputing. Bookmark the page for the syntax, but do the example once in a blank sheet and check it against the tool above — five minutes of hands-on practice fixes the method in memory far better than re-reading, and it surfaces the small snags while they are still harmless. After that the technique is genuinely yours: faster than searching for it again, and reliable enough to drop into work that other people depend on.

Common mistakes

• Omitting the holidays range, which lets a deadline land on a public holiday.
• Forgetting to anchor the holiday range before filling down, so later rows check a shrinking list.
• Expecting the start date to count as day one; it does not — counting begins the following working day.

Frequently asked questions