How to count the working days in a month
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 ✓ Verified in Google Sheets (2026-08-30)How many business days a given month has — for capacity planning, quotas, and billing.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel (desktop) | =NETWORKDAYS(A2,EOMONTH(A2,0)) | A2 = any date in the month. EOMONTH(A2,0) is that month's last day; NETWORKDAYS skips weekends. |
| Google Sheets | =NETWORKDAYS(A2,EOMONTH(A2,0)) | Identical. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =NETWORKDAYS(A2,EOMONTH(A2,0)) | Identical. |
How it works
NETWORKDAYS counts weekdays (Mon-Fri) between two dates inclusive, and EOMONTH(A2,0) gives the last day of the month, so pairing them with the first of the month counts every working day it contains: August 2026 has 21. To count from the first properly, pass DATE(YEAR(A2),MONTH(A2),1) as the start rather than an arbitrary mid-month date. Add a range of public holidays as NETWORKDAYS' third argument to exclude them, or use NETWORKDAYS.INTL if your weekend isn't Saturday-Sunday. Dividing a monthly target by this count gives a required daily run-rate.
Verified, not just documented
We ran =NETWORKDAYS(DATE(2026,8,1),EOMONTH(DATE(2026,8,1),0)) in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned 21 — 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 21 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 · EOMONTH — see full Excel, Google Sheets & LibreOffice compatibility for each.
Related recipes
- How to count business days left in the month
- How to count business days between two dates
- How to get the number of days in a month
- How to get the first and last day of the month
- How to get the first day of next month