Calculate the number of business days between two dates?

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I’ve had such a task before and I’ve got the solution.
I would avoid enumerating all days in between when it’s avoidable, which is the case here. I don’t even mention creating a bunch of DateTime instances, as I saw in one of the answers above. This is really waste of processing power. Especially in the real world situation, when you have to examine time intervals of several months.
See my code, with comments, below.

    /// <summary>
    /// Calculates number of business days, taking into account:
    ///  - weekends (Saturdays and Sundays)
    ///  - bank holidays in the middle of the week
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="firstDay">First day in the time interval</param>
    /// <param name="lastDay">Last day in the time interval</param>
    /// <param name="bankHolidays">List of bank holidays excluding weekends</param>
    /// <returns>Number of business days during the 'span'</returns>
    public static int BusinessDaysUntil(this DateTime firstDay, DateTime lastDay, params DateTime[] bankHolidays)
    {
        firstDay = firstDay.Date;
        lastDay = lastDay.Date;
        if (firstDay > lastDay)
            throw new ArgumentException("Incorrect last day " + lastDay);

        TimeSpan span = lastDay - firstDay;
        int businessDays = span.Days + 1;
        int fullWeekCount = businessDays / 7;
        // find out if there are weekends during the time exceedng the full weeks
        if (businessDays > fullWeekCount*7)
        {
            // we are here to find out if there is a 1-day or 2-days weekend
            // in the time interval remaining after subtracting the complete weeks
            int firstDayOfWeek = (int) firstDay.DayOfWeek;
            int lastDayOfWeek = (int) lastDay.DayOfWeek;
            if (lastDayOfWeek < firstDayOfWeek)
                lastDayOfWeek += 7;
            if (firstDayOfWeek <= 6)
            {
                if (lastDayOfWeek >= 7)// Both Saturday and Sunday are in the remaining time interval
                    businessDays -= 2;
                else if (lastDayOfWeek >= 6)// Only Saturday is in the remaining time interval
                    businessDays -= 1;
            }
            else if (firstDayOfWeek <= 7 && lastDayOfWeek >= 7)// Only Sunday is in the remaining time interval
                businessDays -= 1;
        }

        // subtract the weekends during the full weeks in the interval
        businessDays -= fullWeekCount + fullWeekCount;

        // subtract the number of bank holidays during the time interval
        foreach (DateTime bankHoliday in bankHolidays)
        {
            DateTime bh = bankHoliday.Date;
            if (firstDay <= bh && bh <= lastDay)
                --businessDays;
        }

        return businessDays;
    }

Edit by Slauma, August 2011

Great answer! There is little bug though. I take the freedom to edit this answer since the answerer is absent since 2009.

The code above assumes that DayOfWeek.Sunday has the value 7 which is not the case. The value is actually 0. It leads to a wrong calculation if for example firstDay and lastDay are both the same Sunday. The method returns 1 in this case but it should be 0.

Easiest fix for this bug: Replace in the code above the lines where firstDayOfWeek and lastDayOfWeek are declared by the following:

int firstDayOfWeek = firstDay.DayOfWeek == DayOfWeek.Sunday 
    ? 7 : (int)firstDay.DayOfWeek;
int lastDayOfWeek = lastDay.DayOfWeek == DayOfWeek.Sunday
    ? 7 : (int)lastDay.DayOfWeek;

Now the result is:

  • Friday to Friday -> 1
  • Saturday to Saturday -> 0
  • Sunday to Sunday -> 0
  • Friday to Saturday -> 1
  • Friday to Sunday -> 1
  • Friday to Monday -> 2
  • Saturday to Monday -> 1
  • Sunday to Monday -> 1
  • Monday to Monday -> 1

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