Working days in Norway in 2021

How working days in Norway are counted in 2021

The 253 working days shown above are the 365 calendar days of 2021, minus the 104 Saturdays and Sundays, minus the 8 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 2021 that applies to 5 of Norway'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 Norway

Norwegian working time under the Arbeidsmiljøloven sets a 40-hour standard week, reduced to 37.5 by collective agreement across most of the labour market. The standard private-sector week is Monday to Friday with banks operating Monday to Friday. The Tvisteloven and Domstolloven roll procedural deadlines falling on a Saturday, Sunday or helligdag to the next working day. Settlement of Norwegian krone transactions runs on Norges Bank's NBO settlement system, which observes the statutory ten-day list plus 1 May and 17 May, plus Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve from noon as half days under banking sector practice.

Norway has ten statutory public holidays under the Lov om helligdager og helligdagsfred of 1995. The list is fully Lutheran by historical inheritance: New Year's Day, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Easter Monday, Ascension, Whit Sunday, Whit Monday, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Labour Day on 1 May and Constitution Day on 17 May are not strictly helligdager but offentlige høytidsdager (public solemn days) under a separate 1947 statute and are nonetheless paid days off across the economy. Constitution Day commemorates the 1814 Eidsvoll constitution and is the most visibly celebrated day, with children's parades nationwide.

This matters because the working-day total is not spread evenly. Some months in Norway 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 Norway holiday calendar for 2021. 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 Norway (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.