Working days in Germany in 1985

How working days in Germany are counted in 1985

The 248 working days shown above are the 365 calendar days of 1985, minus the 104 Saturdays and Sundays, minus the 13 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 1985 that applies to 3 of Germany's public holidays. At a standard eight-hour day, 248 working days works out to roughly 1,984 working hours across the year, before any annual leave is taken.

What counts as a working day in Germany

German labour law distinguishes between Werktag, meaning any day except Sunday and a recognised public holiday, and Arbeitstag, the actual scheduled working day for the individual employer. Saturday is a Werktag in the legal sense, which matters for notice periods under the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch section 193 and for the calculation of statutory leave under the Bundesurlaubsgesetz. The standard private-sector week is Monday to Friday with Saturday occasionally used in retail and trades. Bank settlement follows the TARGET2 calendar within the eurozone, which closes only six days a year, so domestic German bank holidays do not automatically suspend cross-border euro settlement.

Germany has nine federally guaranteed public holidays under the Feiertagsgesetz of each Land, but the full list runs to thirteen because six of the sixteen federal states add regional holidays. Bavaria observes the most with thirteen, including Epiphany, Corpus Christi, Assumption of Mary and All Saints' Day; Berlin and most northern states observe nine. Reformation Day was made a national one-off in 2017 to mark the 500th anniversary of Luther's theses, then became permanent only in the northern Lutheran states. Augsburg uniquely observes Augsburger Friedensfest on 8 August, the only city-level public holiday in Europe granted by statute.

This matters because the working-day total is not spread evenly. Some months in Germany 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 20.7 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 Germany holiday calendar for 1985. 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 Germany (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.