Working days in Chile in 2012

How working days in Chile are counted in 2012

The 249 working days shown above are the 366 calendar days of 2012, minus the 105 Saturdays and Sundays, minus the 12 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 2012 that applies to 4 of Chile's public holidays. At a standard eight-hour day, 249 working days works out to roughly 1,992 working hours across the year, before any annual leave is taken.

What counts as a working day in Chile

The Código del Trabajo article 22 sets the standard private-sector week at 44 hours over five or six days, reduced from 45 by Law 21.561 of 2023 phased in through 2028. The standard private-sector office and banking week is Monday to Friday with Sunday as the statutory weekly rest day under article 35. The Civil Procedure Code (Código de Procedimiento Civil) article 66 rolls procedural deadlines falling on a feriado to the next día hábil. Settlement of Chilean peso transactions runs on the Banco Central de Chile's LBTR RTGS system and the ComBanc clearing house, which observe the seventeen-day national holiday list.

Chile recognises about seventeen feriados legales under Law 19.973 of 2004 and subsequent amendments, alongside dates fixed by separate statutes. The list includes New Year's Day, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Labour Day on 1 May, Navy Day on 21 May commemorating the 1879 Battle of Iquique, Saint Peter and Saint Paul on 29 June, Our Lady of Mount Carmel on 16 July (patroness of the armed forces), Assumption on 15 August, Independence Day on 18 September and Glories of the Army on 19 September together forming the Fiestas Patrias, Day of the Encounter of Two Worlds on 12 October, Day of the Evangelical Churches, All Saints' Day, Immaculate Conception, Christmas Day and Plebiscite Day where applicable.

This matters because the working-day total is not spread evenly. Some months in Chile 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 20.8 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 Chile holiday calendar for 2012. 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 Chile (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.