Reviewed by Carlos Vargas, Texas Licensed Funeral Director (TFSC #119648) ·
A count of open days, not a promise
An office may say that something takes “ten business days,” or you may simply want to know how many working days fall between today and a flight. Counting on a wall calendar goes wrong when the office keeps a different week, observes holidays from another country or closes on a day you did not expect. This counter does that arithmetic from the calendar you give it.
It cannot see any office’s workload. It does not know when a request was accepted, whether a document was complete or how long a review takes. The result is a number of open days inside your interval and nothing more. Do not book travel on the strength of it.
Count the open days
Use the calendar the office itself publishes. Do not enter names or case numbers.
The controls require JavaScript. You can also count the days on a paper calendar using the rules described below.
The U.S. federal holiday calendar is only one calendar
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management publishes the federal holiday schedule that applies to federal employees. It lists eleven holidays a year and explains the “in lieu of” rule: when a holiday falls on a Saturday, the preceding Friday is treated as the holiday for most federal employees, and when it falls on a Sunday, the following Monday is. That is why OPM shows Independence Day on Friday, July 3, in 2026 and on Monday, July 5, in 2027.
The button in this tool adds the dates OPM lists for 2026 and 2027 that fall inside your interval, and nothing beyond those two years. A foreign consulate is not a U.S. federal office. It may observe holidays from its own country, some U.S. holidays, both or neither, and it may keep public hours on only some weekdays. Use the OPM dates only when the office you are counting for tells you it follows that schedule, and delete any line that does not apply.
Texas state offices keep their own schedule
Texas agencies that issue or authenticate records do not follow the federal list. The Texas State Auditor’s Office posts the state holiday schedule for each fiscal year of the biennium. It explains that state employees are entitled to a paid day off on national, state and skeleton-crew holidays the State observes, and that on a state holiday an agency must still have enough employees on duty to conduct public business, except on state holidays that fall on a weekend, the Friday after Thanksgiving, December 24 and December 26.
In practice that means “open” and “fully staffed” are not the same thing, and a county or city registrar may keep yet another calendar. When you count days for a Texas office, copy its closures from its own notice or from the state schedule into the closure box. This page does not reproduce the Texas dates, because they change with each biennium.
Read the count
Select Count days after entering both dates. The result lists each figure separately so you can see what changed the total.
| Line | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Calendar days counted | Every date in the interval, with or without the start date as you chose |
| Days closed by the weekly schedule | Dates that fall on a weekday you left unmarked |
| Listed closures falling on open days | Closure lines that removed an otherwise open day |
| Open days counted | Calendar days minus those two groups |
A closure that falls outside the interval, or on a weekday already marked closed, is reported but does not change the total. A line the tool cannot read is listed so you can fix it. Whether the start date counts depends on how the office counts; if its notice does not say, ask. Dates are handled as plain calendar dates, so daylight-saving changes do not shift them.
Keep your entries current
Offices announce closures during the year, and unplanned closures for weather or staffing never appear on a published list. Recount when the office updates its notice. Any edit clears the previous result, so count again before copying or downloading. The interval is limited to 366 days.
The counter script does not transmit what you type or write it to browser storage. Other services on this site follow their own privacy terms. The closure notes are for a holiday name or a source, not for a person’s name, a case number or medical information.
Questions about counting business days
- Does the count tell me when the consulate will return my documents?
- No. It counts open days between two dates you chose. It has no information about an office’s workload or decisions.
- Should I count the day I submitted something?
- That depends on how the office counts. The tool lets you choose either way; if the office’s notice does not say, ask the office.
- Why are consulate holidays not built in?
- Each consulate sets its own calendar and can change it. Copying the dates from the consulate’s own notice keeps the count tied to a source you can check.
