WORKDAY Function in Excel

Arguments

start_date

Required

A date that represents the start date.

days

Required

The number of nonweekend and nonholiday days before or after start_date. A positive value for days yields a future date; a negative value yields a past date.

holidays

Optional

An optional list of one or more dates to exclude from the working calendar, such as state and federal holidays and floating holidays. The list can be either a range of cells that contain the dates or an array constant of the serial numbers that represent the dates.

What WORKDAY does

WORKDAY calculates a future or past date by counting only business days. It skips Saturdays and Sundays by default and can also exclude a custom list of holidays.

Practical examples

Add ten business days to a start date

=WORKDAY(A2,10)

This is useful for due dates, SLAs, and fulfillment timelines that should ignore weekends.

Add business days while excluding holidays

=WORKDAY(A2,10,F2:F10)

The range F2:F10 can hold company holidays that should not count as working days.

Common mistakes and notes

WORKDAY assumes Saturday and Sunday are weekends

If your schedule uses a different weekend pattern, use WORKDAY.INTL instead.

Holiday cells must contain real dates

If the holiday range contains text that only looks like dates, Excel may ignore those entries.

Negative day counts move backward

Use a negative days argument when you need the previous business date rather than a future one.