Working Hours Calculator

Add up the total working hours over any date range with full control over daily start and end times, lunch break, workdays of the week, and which country's holidays should be excluded. The result includes a week-by-week table so you can verify your numbers against a timesheet or invoice.

Used by contractors billing time, project planners estimating effort, HR teams sizing leave entitlements, and freelancers documenting hours worked for an audit or grant report. For pure day counts (no hours), use the business days between dates calculator.

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Worked example: a contractor billing a 30-day engagement

A senior data engineer in Boston signs a 30-day discovery contract with start date June 1, 2026 and end date June 30, 2026, billing 9am-6pm with a 60-minute lunch (8 billable hours per day). Mon-Fri schedule, US federal holidays excluded. The 30-day window contains 22 weekdays. June 19 (Juneteenth, observed on Friday because June 19 is a Friday) is a federal holiday. The calculator returns 21 workdays × 8 hours = 168 billable hours. At a rate of $200 per hour, that is $33,600 of billable value, which is the number the contractor enters on the SOW deliverable schedule.

Worked example: a remote worker proving a 40-hour week

A remote employee in Austin needs to document quarterly hours for a visa renewal. Q1 2026 runs Jan 1 to Mar 31. The calculator with a Mon-Fri 9am-5pm schedule, 30-minute lunch, and US federal holidays excluded returns 64 workdays × 7.5 hours = 480 hours over the quarter. Subtracting MLK Day (Jan 19) and Presidents' Day (Feb 16) is automatic. The 480 figure is the number that ends up on the immigration attorney's form I-129 supporting documentation.

Different work-week conventions

Most countries use a Mon-Fri work week, but a meaningful slice of the world does not. Israel runs Sun-Thu, with Friday a half-day for many offices. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and several other Gulf states use Sun-Thu or Mon-Fri depending on industry (the UAE moved its public sector to a Mon-Fri half-day-Friday schedule in 2022). Iran runs Sat-Wed. The 4-day week experiment (Mon-Thu) is gaining ground in the UK, Iceland, and Belgium. The Workdays toggles cover any of these patterns; pick the combination that matches your contract or local practice.

Half-day holidays and observed days

The calculator treats every listed holiday as a full day off. In practice, many countries observe certain days as half days (Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve in Germany, Switzerland, and parts of Scandinavia; Holy Thursday in Spain). The site's holiday data does not encode half-day status, since employer practice varies. If your employer observes a half-day, deduct the saved hours from the calculator total manually. Observed-day shifts (a Saturday holiday observed the preceding Friday) are already baked into the country data, so a holiday that falls on a weekend will not double-count.

For informational purposes only

This calculator provides general estimates based on business day counting rules. It does not constitute legal advice. Deadlines in legal, regulatory, or contractual matters may be subject to jurisdiction-specific rules, court orders, or statutory exceptions. Always verify critical deadlines with a qualified professional.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does the calculator handle holidays?

Each holiday in the selected country's calendar is treated as a full day off. The calculator subtracts that day's hours from the total. If you observe only some of the listed holidays, leave the country set to None and add a manual deduction at the end. Half-day observances such as Christmas Eve in some European countries are not modeled separately, since the half-day convention varies by employer.

Can I model a 4-day work week or a Sun-Thu schedule?

Yes. The Workdays selector lets you toggle any combination of weekdays. A 4-day Mon-Thu week is one click; a Sun-Thu week (common in Israel and Saudi Arabia) is another. The hours per day are calculated from your start/end/lunch inputs and applied to whichever days you mark as working.

What happens if my end time is before my start time (e.g. an overnight shift)?

The calculator treats negative daily hours as zero rather than wrapping into the next day, since that math gets ambiguous (does a shift starting at 10pm finishing at 6am count as Monday hours or Tuesday hours?). For overnight shifts, run two calculations: one for the evening portion of each day, one for the morning portion of the next day.

Does it account for daylight saving time?

Working hours per day depend only on the clock-time start and end you enter, not on the actual elapsed wall-clock duration. A 9am-to-5pm day is 8 hours regardless of DST. The exception is the day of the spring-forward or fall-back transition itself, which technically loses or gains one hour; payroll and timesheet systems typically ignore this micro-difference, so the calculator does too.

Can I export the weekly breakdown?

The weekly table is selectable and copyable directly from the page. For larger date ranges (over 26 weeks), the totals are accurate but the on-screen table truncates. If you need a full week-by-week export, copy the URL and re-run with smaller ranges, or use the totals plus your own spreadsheet for the per-week split.