A year holds 365 days, and 52 weeks holds only 364. That spare day, and where it lands, is why this question has three answers instead of one, and why they differ by more than a fortnight.
How many working days in a year? For 2026 the answer is 261 weekdays, or 250 once the 11 US federal holidays are removed, because all of them fall on weekdays that year. Subtract your own leave and the figure drops again, to about 230 after three weeks of vacation and a week of sick days.
Each of those three is a different question. Taking them in order is the only way to get a number you can use for anything.
How many weekdays are in a year?
Start from the calendar, because this part is arithmetic rather than policy. A common year is 365 days, which is 52 weeks and 1 day, and a leap year is 366, which is 52 weeks and 2 days. Fifty-two weeks contain exactly 260 weekdays and 104 weekend days. The leftover day or two is what makes the answer move: whether it lands on a weekday or a weekend depends on which day the year starts on.
2026 begins on a Thursday and is a common year, so the extra day is a Thursday and the count comes to 261 weekdays and 104 weekend days. 2027 begins on a Friday, also a common year, and also lands on 261 and 104. 2028 begins on a Saturday and is a leap year, so both leftover days are weekend days, and the count falls to 260 weekdays and 106 weekend days.
That is the whole range. A year holds 260, 261 or 262 weekdays and never anything else.
What does the federal government use?
The US Office of Personnel Management had to settle the same question in order to divide an annual salary into an hourly rate, and its answer is the most useful published version of the count. Over the 28 years it takes the calendar to repeat, OPM reports 4 years with 262 workdays, 17 years with 261, and 7 years with 260.
Average those and you get the divisor: (262 x 4) + (261 x 17) + (260 x 7) = 1,048 + 4,437 + 1,820 = 7,305 workdays across 28 years, and 7,305 divided by 28 is 260.892857. At 8 hours a day that is 2,087.14 hours, which is where the 2,087-hour divisor in US federal pay comes from, and how many billable hours in a year runs the same cycle in hours rather than days. The divisor was adopted for fiscal years 1984 and 1985 under the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1982, and the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985, Public Law 99-272 of 7 April 1986, made it permanent by amending 5 U.S.C. 5504(b). The 8-hour day is an assumption of the arithmetic rather than something the statute requires, and working hours in a year works through what changes if your own day is not 8.
Note what OPM is counting here. Those are weekdays, holidays included. The divisor exists to spread a salary evenly, not to describe days spent working.
How many working days after holidays?
Now the answer becomes jurisdictional, and the US federal calendar is the cleanest worked example because OPM publishes the observed dates.
For 2026 the 11 US federal holidays are observed on Thursday 1 January, Monday 19 January, Monday 16 February, Monday 25 May, Friday 19 June, Friday 3 July, Monday 7 September, Monday 12 October, Wednesday 11 November, Thursday 26 November and Friday 25 December. All 11 fall on weekdays, so 261 minus 11 is 250 working days in 2026.
2027 is the interesting one, and it is why published counts for that year disagree. Its own 11 observed dates are again all weekdays, which would give 261 minus 11, or 250. But 1 January 2028 is a Saturday, and OPM states that “if a holiday falls on a Saturday, for most Federal employees, the preceding Friday will be treated as a holiday for pay and leave purposes”. That preceding Friday is 31 December 2027, and OPM lists it in the 2028 table. Count it where it actually falls and 2027 contains 12 observed holidays on weekdays, so 261 minus 12 is 249.
Both 250 and 249 are defensible for 2027. They differ because one counts holidays by the year they belong to and the other by the day off you actually get, which is exactly the sort of thing a single printed number cannot tell you.
| Year | Days | Weekend days | Weekdays | Observed US federal holidays on weekdays | Working days |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 365 | 104 | 261 | 11 | 250 |
| 2027 | 365 | 104 | 261 | 11, or 12 counting 31 December | 250, or 249 |
| 2028 | 366 | 106 | 260 | 10 | 250 |
2028 makes the point from the other side. It is a leap year beginning on a Saturday, so it holds only 260 weekdays, and only 10 US federal holidays are observed inside the calendar year, because New Year’s Day was already taken on 31 December 2027. That gives 260 minus 10, which is 250, exactly the same working total as 2026 despite two fewer weekdays. The next New Year’s Day, 1 January 2029, falls on a Monday, so nothing spills out of 2028 in return.
Outside the United States the subtraction is different and so is the vocabulary. In the United Kingdom, GOV.UK states that almost all workers are legally entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year, that most people on a 5-day week must receive at least 28 days of paid annual leave, and that bank holidays do not have to be given as paid leave, although an employer can choose to count them toward the 28. So the UK subtraction starts from a statutory entitlement rather than from a list of named days, and the same headline weekday count produces a different working year.
How many days will you actually work?
Neither 261 nor 250 is your year, because both count every remaining weekday as worked. Take 2026 and keep subtracting.
Start at 250 working days after federal holidays. Remove 15 days of vacation, which is three weeks at 5 days, and 235 remain. Remove 5 days of sick leave and 230 remain. That is 230 days out of 365, which is 63 percent of the calendar, and 230 divided by 5 is 46 working weeks rather than 52.
At 8 hours a day, 230 days is 1,840 hours. At 7.5 hours it is 1,725. Both sit well below the 2,080 that 52 weeks at 40 hours implies, and the difference is not a rounding error: 2,080 minus 1,840 is 240 hours, or six standard weeks. The method for turning your own start and finish times into a daily figure is in how to calculate work hours, and the hours calculator will run it for you.
One more subtraction people forget. Days worked is not the same as days worked on the thing you are paid for. If you are self-employed, some share of those 230 days goes to proposals, bookkeeping and admin, and only the remainder is chargeable. That split is the subject of billable vs. non-billable hours, and it is usually larger than the holiday subtraction above.
Does the count per month help more than the count per year?
Often, yes, because the annual figure divided by 12 is a fiction. The weekdays in each month of 2026 run 22, 20, 22, 22, 21, 22, 23, 21, 22, 22, 21 and 23. That is a spread of 20 to 23, so a month can hold 15 percent more working days than another month in the same year, since 23 divided by 20 is 1.15. A twelfth of 261 is 21.75, so planning by twelfths is off by 1.75 days in February and 1.25 days in July, before a single holiday or day of leave is counted.
2027 runs 21, 20, 23, 22, 21, 22, 22, 22, 22, 21, 22 and 23, for the same total of 261 arranged differently. If you invoice monthly, that arrangement is the thing that makes two months of identical effort produce different totals.
Which number should you use?
Use 261 when you want the calendar fact for a specific year, and recount it rather than reusing last year’s. Use 260.892857 days, or 2,087 hours, when you are matching US federal pay arithmetic, because that figure is written into the rule. Use 250 for 2026 when you want a US working year after public holidays. And use your own count, after your own leave and your own jurisdiction’s holidays, for anything that involves planning or pricing, because that is the only one describing the year you will have.
The last of those is the only figure you cannot look up, and it is the one most people estimate. Timeness exists for that step: make an activity for each kind of work, tap once to start and once to switch, and the month and year donut charts show how the days were actually spent rather than how many were theoretically available. The data stays on the device with private iCloud sync, and any past entry can be opened and corrected if a day was logged wrong.
After one full year of that you will not need this article. You will have your own number, which will be lower than 250 and more useful than any of the counts above. Until then, 261 weekdays is the honest starting point and everything after it is subtraction. The same subtraction applies inside each day, and how many hours is 9 to 5 does it for the lunch break. If you want to see what a single week actually contains before committing to a year, how many hours is full time runs the same arithmetic at the weekly scale.