Working hours in a year

How the yearly working hours are counted

The calculator walks through every date of the chosen year and counts the days that fall on your working pattern: Monday to Thursday, Monday to Friday or Monday to Saturday. From that number it subtracts the public holidays that land on a workday and the vacation days you take, then multiplies the remaining days by your hours per day. The monthly table shows the calendar workdays and hours before any time off, so you can see which months are long and which are short.

Example for 2026 with a Monday-to-Friday week: the year has 261 weekdays. Take away 11 public holidays and 10 vacation days and 240 working days remain. At 8 hours a day that is 1,920 working hours, or 160 hours in an average month and about 36.8 hours in an average calendar week.

These totals are gross: no holidays or leave removed. A common year has 52 weeks plus one day, a leap year 52 weeks plus two, which is why the count moves between 260 and 262 depending on which weekday January 1 falls on.

Gross hours, net hours and what to use them for

The 2,080-hour figure (52 weeks × 40 hours) is the usual shortcut for turning an annual salary into an hourly rate, and the US Office of Personnel Management uses 2,087 hours, the long-run average, for federal pay. Both are gross numbers that include paid holidays and leave. If you want to know what your time is really worth, or how many hours you can bill as a freelancer, use the net figure after time off: dividing a salary by 1,920 instead of 2,080 raises the hourly value by about 8%.

In the United States there are 11 federal holidays; many European countries have 8 to 13, and statutory annual leave in the EU is at least four weeks. Enter only the holidays that fall on your own workdays, because one that lands on a weekend changes nothing for a Monday-to-Friday schedule. Part-time staff can enter their real daily hours or pick the four-day pattern to see their own annual total.