Working days in Italy in 2006

How working days in Italy are counted in 2006

The 249 working days shown above are the 365 calendar days of 2006, minus the 105 Saturdays and Sundays, minus the 11 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 2006 that applies to 2 of Italy'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 Italy

Italian civil law in article 2963 of the Codice Civile and procedural rules in article 155 of the Codice di Procedura Civile treat a giorno feriale as any day except Sunday and a recognised festività, with Saturday counted as feriale for substantive deadlines. Article 155 paragraph 5 specifically extends procedural deadlines falling on a Saturday to the next non-holiday day. The standard working week in private employment is Monday to Friday, while banks generally open Monday to Friday and close on Saturdays. Bank settlement uses TARGET2 for euro and the Banca d'Italia BI-COMP system for retail payments, which observes the national list of twelve.

Italy recognises twelve festività nazionali by Law 260 of 1949 and subsequent amendments, including the patronal feast day of each comune, which means the actual count depends on where you work. Rome closes for Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June, Milan for Sant'Ambrogio on 7 December, Naples for San Gennaro on 19 September, none of which apply nationally. Republic Day on 2 June commemorates the 1946 referendum that abolished the monarchy. Liberation Day on 25 April marks the 1945 end of Nazi-Fascist occupation. The combination of dense religious calendar and patronal holidays gives Italy among the highest holiday counts in the European Union.

This matters because the working-day total is not spread evenly. Some months in Italy 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 Italy holiday calendar for 2006. 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 Italy (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.