EU Public Holiday Counter

Count working days between dates for any EU27 country

Count net working days between two dates for any of the 27 EU member states plus the UK, Switzerland, and Norway. Subtracts weekends and country-specific public holidays — including Easter-based ones — for payroll, SLA, and contract-deadline math. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

Last updated Source: Gera Tools

How are working days counted?

The tool counts every calendar day in the inclusive range, removes Saturdays and Sundays, then removes any public holiday that falls on a Monday-to-Friday. A holiday landing on a weekend is not double-counted.

Counting net working days between two dates is a core task for payroll cut-offs, service-level agreements, notice periods, and contractual deadlines. A simple weekday count is not enough — every EU country removes a different set of public holidays, and several of those holidays move each year because they are tied to Easter. This tool counts the working days between any two dates for all 27 EU member states (plus the UK, Switzerland, and Norway), deducting both weekends and the correct national public holidays.

How it works

The tool builds the public-holiday set for the year(s) your range spans, then walks the inclusive date range day by day:

  1. Count every calendar day from start to end (inclusive).
  2. Remove Saturdays and Sundays.
  3. Remove any remaining day that is a national public holiday.

Fixed-date holidays (such as New Year’s Day on 1 January) come straight from a per-country table. Easter-based holidays — Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension Day, Whit Monday, and Corpus Christi — are derived from Easter Sunday, which is computed with the Anonymous Gregorian algorithm (Gauss’s method) so the result is correct for any year in the foreseeable future.

A holiday that falls on a Saturday or Sunday is not deducted a second time; the weekend already removed it from the working-day count.

Why Easter-based dates matter so much

The five moveable Christian feasts can shift the working-day count by up to five days in a given range. Easter Sunday falls anywhere from 22 March to 25 April. That means Ascension Day (39 days later) can land anywhere in early May to early June, and Whit Monday (49 days after Easter) anywhere in late May to mid-June. For cross-border contracts that specify a 30 or 60 working-day period, missing these holidays in the calculation can throw a deadline by a week.

Country quirks worth knowing

EU member states agree on very little when it comes to public holidays. Some highlights:

CountryDistinctive feature
GermanyNo single national list; up to 13 holidays per Bundesland. This tool uses the federal-level set common to all Länder.
France11 fixed national days; no Easter-Saturday bank holiday.
Spain8 fixed national days; autonomous communities add up to 2 regional days (not included here).
NetherlandsGood Friday is not a statutory public holiday nationally but many employers observe it.
Ireland10 public holidays including St Patrick’s Day (17 March) and the August bank holiday.
SwedenMidsummer Eve (Friday before Midsummer Day) is widely observed but not a statutory holiday in every sector.

The tool uses the nationwide statutory set for each country. Always confirm against your local labour authority for regionally variable or recently added holidays.

Worked example

For a German company, a range of 2026-12-21 to 2026-12-31 spans 11 calendar days. Removing four weekend days leaves 7 weekdays. Removing Christmas Day (25 December) and Boxing Day (26 December) leaves 5 net working days. If that same calculation were run for a French company, St Stephen’s Day (26 December, known as the 2nd day of Christmas) is not a national holiday in France, so the French count would be 6 net working days over the same period — a one-day difference that can matter for notice period compliance.