SaaS Contracts: the "Support During Business Hours" Clause

"Support during business hours" reads as self-explanatory until a ticket lands at four o'clock on a Friday afternoon. Whether the response target is then met on Friday evening, on Monday or on Tuesday depends on four definitions in the vendor's support terms: which hours count, in whose time zone, on which days, and with which holidays left out. No standard set of answers exists. This guide quotes what five vendors publish, as read on 10 October 2026, and works the arithmetic on four clocks. The definitions in your own contract are the ones that bind.

Four definitions decide the deadline

A response target counted in business hours is a clock that stops and starts. To know when it runs, you need:

1. The hours. The opening and closing time of a support day.
2. The time zone. The customer's local time, the vendor's, or one fixed zone for everybody.
3. The days. Monday to Friday is one answer, and a window that never closes mid-week is another.
4. The holidays. Whose calendar, and where the list is published.

If the support terms leave one of the four open, ask for it in writing before you sign. Each of them moves the deadline, as the examples below show.

What five vendors publish

Microsoft, Azure support plans. Microsoft's response table sets an initial response time for each severity and plan and says which of them run on business hours. On the Standard plan, Severity A (critical business impact) carries a response time of less than 1 hour with 24x7 access, and Severity C (minimum business impact) less than 8 hours with business hours access; for a Severity C incident, the page says, "Microsoft will contact you during business hours only". A footnote defines the term: for most countries, business hours are from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM during week days, weekends and holidays excluded; for North America they are 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM Pacific time, Monday through Friday excluding holidays; in Japan, 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM on weekdays. The page does not list the holidays.

Google Cloud, Technical Support Services Guidelines. Google defines "Hours of Operation" as 17:00 on Sunday to 17:00 on Friday, Pacific Time Zone, except for holidays in local time for each region documented in the Google Support Tool, and a "Business Day" as any day during the Hours of Operation. A request received outside those hours is logged and processed during the next Business Day. For Standard Support the target initial response times, during the Hours of Operation, are 4 hours for P2 and 8 hours for P3 and P4. "Business hours" here is a single window five days long, not eight hours a day.

GitHub, Premium Support. GitHub lists the hours of operation of both Premium plans as 24 x 7, with an initial response time of 30 minutes for Urgent tickets and 4 hours for High. Two sentences on the page matter for the arithmetic: "Response time begins when GitHub Premium Support sets the priority level of the ticket", and "A response does not mean the issue has been resolved."

GitLab, GitLab Support. GitLab's support page uses two terms side by side. Its "24x5" means that support engineers are actively responding to tickets from Sunday 3pm Pacific Time through Friday 5pm Pacific Time, and the Priority Support table puts every level except an emergency on that clock: 4 hours for a highly degraded instance, 8 hours for medium impact and 24 hours for low impact, against 30 minutes, 24x7, for an emergency. The same page lists regional business hours for the preferred region a customer selects on a ticket: 09:00 to 21:00 AEST (Brisbane) for Asia Pacific, 08:00 to 18:00 CET (Amsterdam) for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and 05:00 to 17:00 PT for the Americas, each from Monday to Friday. It adds that these are first-response times and "are not to be considered as an expected time-to-resolution".

Atlassian, Support Offerings. For Cloud products on the Standard plan, Atlassian's table gives technical support hours of 9 hours per day, Monday to Friday, and initial response targets of 2 business hours for Level 1 (application down), 6 business hours for Level 2, 1 business day for Level 3 and 2 business days for Level 4. A footnote defines the nine-hour day: 8AM to 5PM, Monday to Friday, in eleven listed time zones from Pacific (UTC-8) to Australia Eastern Standard Time (UTC+10), with India covered from 10am to 7pm and Japan from 9AM to 6PM, and "Tickets will be handled in the office corresponding to the geo in which they are submitted." Another footnote says Atlassian "will use commercially reasonable efforts to meet the target initial response time".

Five vendors, five different clocks, and one of them has no weekend at all.

The same ticket on four clocks

Take a ticket opened at 4:00 PM on Friday, May 22, 2026, each time in the clock's own time zone.

• Eight business hours, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Monday to Friday, no holiday calendar. One hour runs on Friday. The other seven run on Monday, so the response is due on Monday, May 25 at 4:00 PM.
• The same clock with the US federal holiday calendar. Monday, May 25 is Memorial Day, so the clock stays stopped that day and the response is due on Tuesday, May 26 at 4:00 PM.
• Eight business hours, 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM, Monday to Friday (the hours Microsoft publishes for North America). Two hours run on Friday and six on Monday: due on Monday, May 25 at 12:00 PM, or on Tuesday, May 26 at 12:00 PM with the US federal holidays left out.
• Four hours on a window that closes at 17:00 on Friday and reopens at 17:00 on Sunday (the shape of Google's Hours of Operation). One hour runs before the window closes, and the remaining three run from its reopening: due on Sunday, May 24 at 8:00 PM.

On a 24 x 7 clock the same ticket's target runs straight through the evening and the weekend plays no part.

The spread is wide for one ticket and one headline number. It narrows to nothing in the middle of the week: a four-hour target on a ticket opened at 9:00 AM on Tuesday, May 19 is due at 1:00 PM the same day on any of the business-hours clocks above.

Severity can change the clock

On several of these tables, the severity of a ticket decides not only the length of the target but whether it runs around the clock. Microsoft gives Severity A 24x7 access and Severity C business hours only. Severity B sits between: business hours access with 24x7 available, and a customer who chooses 24x7 commits to continuous, 24x7 operation with the Microsoft team until resolution, failing which Microsoft may decrease the severity to level C. A footnote adds that Microsoft may downgrade the severity level if the customer is not able to provide adequate resources or responses.

Google's guidelines put it in contract language. The customer designates a priority from P1 to P4 when submitting a request, Google may reclassify a designation it believes is incorrect, and "Any such determination made by Google is final and binding on Customer". So the clock your ticket runs on is partly the vendor's decision, and the terms say so.

GitLab and Atlassian draw the same line. GitLab answers an emergency around the clock and every other level on its 24x5 window. On Atlassian's Cloud Premium plan, technical support hours are 24/7 for Level 1, 24/5 for Level 2 and nine hours from Monday to Friday for Levels 3 and 4.

Follow the sun

"Follow the sun" means passing a case between regional teams so that someone is always working on it. Google's Customer Care procedures describe it this way: normally a case is handled within one time zone by a single specialist; Priority 1 cases default to follow the sun, "which means that the case is handed off between global teams to provide 24-hour support coverage", and customers with Premium Support can request it for Priority 2 cases. The same page adds a note that cuts the other way: because such cases get continuous attention, "you might need to provide information at all hours of the day". Round-the-clock support needs somebody awake on the customer's side too.

Whose holidays

Microsoft's and Google's definitions leave holidays out, and neither prints the list where the hours are defined. Microsoft says "holidays excluded"; Google points to the holidays "in local time for each region documented in the Google Support Tool". The GitLab and Atlassian pages quoted above do not mention holidays where they set out their hours. A holiday calendar is national, and sometimes regional, so a vendor's closed day can be an ordinary working day for you. Ask for the list for the region that will handle your tickets, and compare it with your own calendar.

For the comparison, the US federal holidays 2026 guide and the country calculators, for example the UK business day calculator, list each country's public holidays with their sources. The time zone business hours overlap tool shows which hours of your working day fall inside a vendor's support day in another zone, and the working hours calculator totals the hours a given schedule covers between two dates. For service credits and the difference between response and resolution targets, see the guide on how SLA response times work.

FAQ

Whose business hours apply if my SaaS vendor is in a different country?

Whatever the support terms define, and vendors define it differently. Microsoft's Azure support page gives 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM on week days for most countries and 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM Pacific time for North America. Google Cloud's guidelines use one window for everyone: 17:00 on Sunday to 17:00 on Friday, Pacific Time Zone. Read the definition, its time zone and its holiday list before relying on a response time.

What does a response time in business hours actually mean?

That the clock only runs during the defined hours. An eight-hour target on a ticket opened at 4:00 PM on a Friday, with business hours of 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM from Monday to Friday, uses one hour on Friday and seven on Monday, so the response is due at 4:00 PM on Monday. If that Monday is a holiday on the vendor's calendar, it is due at 4:00 PM on Tuesday.

Does follow-the-sun support mean 24/7 coverage?

For the cases it covers, yes, by handing them between teams. Google's Customer Care procedures say Priority 1 cases default to follow the sun, meaning the case is handed off between global teams to provide 24-hour support coverage, and that the customer might need to provide information at all hours of the day.

How are public holidays handled for support?

Microsoft's and Google's definitions exclude them from business hours without printing the list alongside. Microsoft's page says weekends and holidays are excluded; Google's guidelines exclude holidays in local time for each region documented in the Google Support Tool. The GitLab and Atlassian pages quoted here do not mention holidays where they set out their hours. Ask the vendor which calendar applies to the region that handles your tickets.