Working days in Ireland in 2020

How working days in Ireland are counted in 2020

The 253 working days shown above are the 366 calendar days of 2020, minus the 104 Saturdays and Sundays, minus the 9 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 2020 that applies to 1 of Ireland's public holidays. At a standard eight-hour day, 253 working days works out to roughly 2,024 working hours across the year, before any annual leave is taken.

What counts as a working day in Ireland

Working day in Irish civil procedure and the Interpretation Act 2005 typically means any day except Saturday, Sunday and a public holiday. The standard private-sector week is Monday to Friday with banks operating Monday to Friday. Statutory annual leave under the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997 is four working weeks, twenty days for a five-day week. Bank settlement of euro transactions runs on TARGET2 since Ireland joined the eurozone in 1999; domestic Irish bank-to-bank clearing uses the Central Bank of Ireland's calendar, which mirrors the ten statutory public holidays.

Ireland recognises ten public holidays under the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, raised from nine by the addition of Saint Brigid's Day on the first Monday of February in 2023, the first new Irish public holiday since the 1990s. The list includes New Year's Day, Saint Patrick's Day, Easter Monday, the first Mondays of May, June, August and October, Christmas Day and Saint Stephen's Day on 26 December. Good Friday is widely observed by closures and historically by a pub trading ban until the Intoxicating Liquor Act 2018 lifted the restriction, but it has never been a statutory public holiday under the 1997 Act.

This matters because the working-day total is not spread evenly. Some months in Ireland 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 21.1 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 Ireland holiday calendar for 2020. 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 Ireland (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.