Excel Formula: Calculate Business Days (WORKDAY) (2024)

WORKDAY.INTL Function in Excel

The WORKDAY.INTL function understands the misery that not everyone has Saturday and Sunday as weekends🤙

You might only have Sunday as your weekend, or Saturday, or Friday, or any other day of the week. I don’t want to say it but for some days, you might have no weekend at all. Varies from employer to employer and nature of work.

Hence the WORKDAY.INTL function allows you to specify the days that you want to be considered as weekends.

By default, it assumes Saturday and Sunday as weekend days (if nothing else is specified). But, if you have a weekend different than these, you can input that as an argument to this function, and Excel will cater to it.

Other than that, it works the same as the WORKDAY function to return a date that’s a certain number of workdays ahead or before the start date.

Syntax of the WORKDAY.INTL function

The syntax of the WORKDAY.INTL function looks like below:

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Syntax Highlighter

Three of the arguments remain the same as the WORKDAY function:

• Start_Date – the initial date
• Days – The number of working days to be added or subtracted from the start date
• Holidays (optional argument) – list of dates to be excluded from working days calculation

The new argument is the weekend argument, which makes the WORKDAY.INTL function different and better from the WORKDAY function.

• Weekend (optional argument): There are two ways how you can dictate weekends to Excel.

Step 1) In the form of numbers (weekend codes):

Step 2) Or in the form of a string of seven digits where 0’s represent weekdays and 1’s represent weekends.

So, if you have Tuesday and Wednesday as your weekend, it will be “0110000”, or if you have Friday and Saturday as your weekend, it will become “0000110”

How to use the WORKDAY.INTL function in Excel

Time, we see how to use the WORKDAY.INTL function in Excel.

Step 1) Let’s find 30 days ahead of the start date in Cell A2 by assuming Friday and Saturday as weekends.

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Syntax Highlighter

The code for Friday and Saturday weekend is 7 hence we have used it. You can otherwise write it as “0000110”.

Step 2) Let’s now use the WORKDAY.INTL function to find the workday 30 days in the past with Sunday & Monday as weekends🔙

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Syntax Highlighter

Click to copy

Syntax Highlighter

Since the weekend code list doesn’t offer a code for the weekend combination of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, we have written it up using the string “0111000”.

Step 4) We can also use it to find workdays starting from today’s date by using the TODAY() function as below.

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Syntax Highlighter

Click to copy

Syntax Highlighter

Things to keep in mind while using the WORKDAY and WORKDAY.INTL function

Here are some quick things to keep in mind while you play around with the WORKDAY and the WORKDAY.INTL function in Excel📝

You may see a #VALUE error if:

• The start date you supply is inappropriate. For example, you supplied it as text in the wrong format as shown below.

• This could also happen if you supply a non-numeric value as the “days” argument, like here:

Additionally, these functions might pose the #NUM! error if:

• The holiday argument is invalid i.e., it is not formatted as a date.
• The weekend argument is invalid.
• Or, if the start_date together with the days argument results in an invalid date.

Conclusion

The WORKDAY and WORKDAY.INTL functions of MS Excel make workday calculations in Excel so much easier and quicker.

If you enjoyed learning how these functions work in Excel, I am sure you’d be interested in the following Excel tutorials, too. Give them a read.

• Excel NOW Function Guide: Get Current Date and Time (2024)
• Day of Week in Excel: WEEKDAY Function Explained (2024)