How to count business days between two dates
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 ✓ Verified in Google Sheets (2026-08-30)Count working days (Monday–Friday) between two dates, e.g. for deadlines or SLAs.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel (desktop) | =NETWORKDAYS(A2,B2) | Add a third argument with a range of holiday dates to exclude them too. |
| Google Sheets | =NETWORKDAYS(A2,B2) | Identical, including the optional holidays argument. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =NETWORKDAYS(A2,B2) | Identical. |
How it works
NETWORKDAYS counts the days from the start date to the end date inclusive, skipping Saturdays and Sundays. July 2026 has 31 days, of which 8 fall on weekends, leaving 23 business days. Pass a range of holiday dates as the third argument to exclude those as well; use NETWORKDAYS.INTL if your weekend isn't Saturday–Sunday.
Verified, not just documented
We ran =NETWORKDAYS(DATE(2026,7,1),DATE(2026,7,31)) in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned 23 — 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 23 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
NETWORKDAYS — see full Excel, Google Sheets & LibreOffice compatibility for each.