Summary

The Excel WORKDAY function takes a date and returns the nearest working day n days in the future or past. You can use the WORKDAY function to calculate things like ship dates, delivery dates, and completion dates that need to take into account working and non-working days.

Purpose 

Get a date n working days in the future or past

Return value 

A serial number representing a particular date in Excel.

Syntax

=WORKDAY(start_date,days,[holidays])
  • start_date - The date from which to start.
  • days - The working days before or after start_date.
  • holidays - [optional] A list dates that should be considered non-work days.

How to use 

The WORKDAY function returns the nearest working day n days in the future or past. WORKDAY can be used to calculate due dates, delivery dates, and other dates that should exclude non-working days.

The WORKDAY function takes three arguments: start_date, days, and holidays. Start_date must be a valid Excel date. The days argument is the number of days in the future or past to calculate a workday. Use a positive number for days to calculate future dates, and a negative number for past dates. Holidays is an optional argument to specify non-working days. Holidays should be provided as a range that contains valid Excel dates. If holidays are not provided, WORKDAY will treat only Saturdays and Sundays as non-working days. 

When calculating a result, WORKDAY does not include the start date as a work day. 

Example #1 - Basic usage

In the formula below, WORKDAY is given Friday, January 1, 2021 for start_date, 1 for days, and F5:F13 for holidays. The result is Monday, January 4, 2021 since Saturday and Sunday are excluded:

=WORKDAY("1-Jan-2021",1,F5:F13)// returns 4-Jan-2021

If the start date is moved back one day to Thursday, December 31, 2021, the result is the same, since January 1 is a holiday, and Saturday and Sunday are also excluded:

=WORKDAY("31-Dec-2020",1,F5:F13) // returns 4-Jan-2021

Example #2 - worksheet as shown

In the worksheet shown above, Column B contains a variety of different start dates, column C contains the number of days to move, and "holidays" are the named range F5:F13. The formula in column D (copied down) is:

=WORKDAY(B5,C5,holidays)

At each row, WORKDAY returns the nearest workday in column D, based on the given start date and days to offset.

Weekends

By default, WORKDAY will exclude weekends (Saturday and Sunday) . If you need to customize which days of the week are considered weekend days, use the more robust WORKDAY.INTL function.

WORKDAY function examples

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WORKDAY function videos

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Dave Bruns

Hi - I'm Dave Bruns, and I run Exceljet with my wife, Lisa. Our goal is to help you work faster in Excel. We create short videos, and clear examples of formulas, functions, pivot tables, conditional formatting, and charts.

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