Working days in China in 2018

How working days in China are counted in 2018

The 255 working days shown above are the 365 calendar days of 2018, minus the 104 Saturdays and Sundays, minus the 6 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 2018 that applies to 0 of China's public holidays. At a standard eight-hour day, 255 working days works out to roughly 2,040 working hours across the year, before any annual leave is taken.

What counts as a working day in China

The Labour Law of the People's Republic of China article 36 caps weekly working hours at 44, with article 38 requiring at least one rest day per week. The standard urban office week is Monday to Friday with both weekend days off, but factories and construction commonly operate six days. The Civil Procedure Law article 75 rolls deadlines falling on a statutory holiday to the next working day, but make-up working Saturdays count as working days for procedural purposes. Settlement for renminbi runs on the People's Bank of China's CNAPS system, which closes on the eleven statutory days and reopens on the designated make-up working weekends.

China observes seven statutory public holidays under the General Office of the State Council's annual circular, but the practical calendar is more complicated. The State Council mandates make-up working weekends to bridge holidays into seven-day Golden Weeks for Spring Festival and National Day. A typical Spring Festival therefore gives seven consecutive days off, paid for by working the immediately preceding or following Saturday and Sunday. The full statutory count is eleven days off but the calendar can show fifteen consecutive days of work without a break around major holidays. Dragon Boat, Qingming and Mid-Autumn Festival follow the lunar calendar and shift annually.

This matters because the working-day total is not spread evenly. Some months in China 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 21.3 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 China holiday calendar for 2018. 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 China (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.