Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: The NETWORKDAYS Function

Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: The NETWORKDAYS Function

In many business situations, days must be counted as “business days” rather than as “calendar days” to represent the actual non-weekend, non-holiday days that have passed between two dates. For this purpose, the NETWORKDAYS function is perfect.

In the next picture, an Excel development company wants to keep track of how many business days (that is, how many actual working days) have passed since a custom budget development project was completed.

The formula in cell B9 is =NETWORKDAYS(B7,B8,E3:E11), with a color-coded explanation in the picture of each argument in the formula. As you can see, not only weekends, but also holidays must be taken into account that may fall between the completion (start) date and today’s (end) date. Notice that weekends and holiday dates for Labor Day and Columbus Day were not included in the NETWORKDAYS count of 38 days between August 25 and October 19 in year 2011.



The NETWORKDAYS function is part of the Analysis ToolPak, which is an Add-In as part of Excel that is automatically installed and ready to be tapped into for versions of Excel starting with 2007.

For the NETWORKDAYS function to work if your version of Excel is 2003 or before, you need to make sure the Analysis ToolPak is installed. To do this, from your menu bar, click Tools > Add-Ins, and in the Add-Ins dialog box window select Analysis ToolPak and click OK. See the following two pictures that show this one-time step.