How to add business days to a date
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 ✓ Verified in Google Sheets (2026-08-30)Find the date N working days from now — due dates, SLAs, ship-by estimates that skip weekends.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel (desktop) | =WORKDAY(A2,10) | Day 1 is the NEXT working day (the start date itself isn't counted). Add a holidays range as the 3rd argument. |
| Google Sheets | =WORKDAY(A2,10) | Identical. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =WORKDAY(A2,10) | Identical. |
How it works
WORKDAY steps forward by working days, skipping Saturdays and Sundays: 10 business days after Friday July 24, 2026 is Friday August 7 (the two intervening weekends are jumped). It counts from the day AFTER the start date, so the start day itself never counts. Pass a range of holiday dates as the third argument to skip those too, use a negative number to go backwards, and WORKDAY.INTL if your weekend isn't Saturday-Sunday. To count working days between two existing dates instead, use NETWORKDAYS.
Verified, not just documented
We ran =TEXT(WORKDAY(DATE(2026,7,24),10),"YYYY-MM-DD") in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned 2026-08-07 — exactly the expected result. We then ran the same formulas in Google Sheets, executed 2026-08-30: a formula-only workbook goes into Google Drive, which converts it to a Sheet and recalculates every formula with Google’s own engine, and comes back out as .xlsx carrying the values Google computed. It returned 2026-08-07 for the worked example, the same value LibreOffice produced. Both engines’ numbers on this page are executed results. The Excel formula follows Microsoft’s official documented syntax — we do not run desktop Excel.
Functions used
WORKDAY — see full Excel, Google Sheets & LibreOffice compatibility for each.