Working days in Switzerland in 1977

How working days in Switzerland are counted in 1977

The 244 working days shown above are the 365 calendar days of 1977, minus the 105 Saturdays and Sundays, minus the 24 public holidays that land on a weekday. Holidays that fall on a Saturday or Sunday are not subtracted, because they do not remove a day anyone would have worked; in 1977 that applies to 9 of Switzerland's public holidays. At a standard eight-hour day, 244 working days works out to roughly 1,952 working hours across the year, before any annual leave is taken.

What counts as a working day in Switzerland

Article 18 of the Federal Act on Work (Arbeitsgesetz) prohibits work on Sundays except by permit. The standard private-sector week is Monday to Friday with banks operating Monday to Friday. The Code of Civil Procedure article 142 rolls procedural deadlines falling on a Saturday, Sunday or a cantonally recognised public holiday at the place of the court to the next working day. Settlement of Swiss franc transactions runs on the Swiss Interbank Clearing system operated by SIX Interbank Clearing, which observes a nationally agreed banking calendar narrower than any cantonal list because banks operate across cantonal boundaries.

Switzerland has only one federal public holiday under article 110 of the Federal Constitution: Swiss National Day on 1 August. Every other public holiday is cantonal and varies across the 26 cantons, with some recognising as many as fifteen days and others as few as seven. Catholic cantons observe Epiphany, Saints Peter and Paul, Assumption, All Saints' and Immaculate Conception; Protestant cantons typically do not. Geneva uniquely observes the Jeûne Genevois on the Thursday after the first Sunday of September. The Federal Act on Work in Industry sets New Year's Day, Christmas Day, Ascension and Swiss National Day as equivalent to a Sunday for industrial labour-law purposes everywhere in Switzerland.

This matters because the working-day total is not spread evenly. Some months in Switzerland carry several public holidays while others have none, so the month-by-month table above is the figure to use for payroll runs, billing cycles, SLA windows, and project plans rather than a flat assumption of about 20.3 working days per month. A month with two weekday holidays can have several fewer working days than a clear one, which changes capacity planning and the realistic delivery date for anything scheduled in business days.

To see the individual dates, the day of the week each holiday lands on, and the full official list, open the Switzerland holiday calendar for 1977. You can subscribe to those dates as an .ics feed so they appear in your own calendar, or use the working-days-between-two-dates calculator to count business days for a specific date range rather than the whole year.

Working-day figures are computed from the public holiday list for Switzerland (source: Nager.Date and the national references above) combined with a Monday-to-Friday business week. Regional holidays and substitute-day rules vary; confirm against the official calendar for legal or payroll use.