NETWORKDAYS Working Days Between Dates

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. Keep the inputs visible and clearly labelled and the whole thing stays auditable — anyone who opens the file later, including you, can see at a glance exactly what feeds the result and change one assumption without hunting through the formula. Treat “networkdays working days between dates” 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 calculation you can defend to a CFO or an auditor 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. If there is any chance you will reuse this, drop it into a small template tab right now: a labelled input area on the left and the formula beside it, checked once against the tool above. Next time the same question comes up, the answer is a single paste away instead of a rebuild from memory.

In Google Sheets

Google Sheets handles this almost identically to Excel. The formula syntax above is the same, and the menu lives under a slightly different label rather than a ribbon tab. Use the platform toggle at the top of the page to switch every keyboard shortcut between Windows and Mac, and expect at most cosmetic differences in naming. The aim was to get you unstuck fast and leave you a little more capable than a copy-paste would. The answer is at the top, the tool proves it, and the detail above shows why it holds — so the next time a colleague asks, you can answer without reaching for search. Here is the takeaway for “networkdays working days between dates”: copy the answer if you are busy, but if you have a spare few minutes, rebuild the example in Excel yourself with the tool above open beside it. That single pass — type it, run it, watch the result move when you change an input — is what turns a formula you found into a technique you trust. Keep your inputs labelled and referenced, never hard-coded, and the same sheet stays correct and auditable as it grows. Done that way, you will not need to look this up again, and you will be the person others ask.

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