Working days in South Africa in 1979

How working days in South Africa are counted in 1979

The 250 working days shown above are the 365 calendar days of 1979, minus the 104 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 1979 that applies to 1 of South Africa's public holidays. At a standard eight-hour day, 250 working days works out to roughly 2,000 working hours across the year, before any annual leave is taken.

What counts as a working day in South Africa

The Basic Conditions of Employment Act 75 of 1997 caps the ordinary working week at 45 hours with at least 36 consecutive hours of rest, normally taken as the weekend. The standard private-sector week is Monday to Friday with banks operating Monday to Friday. Court rules under the Uniform Rules of Court Rule 1 define court day as any day not a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday. Settlement of rand transactions runs on the South African Reserve Bank's SAMOS system, which observes the twelve public holidays and the Sunday-to-Monday substitution rule.

South Africa recognises twelve public holidays under the Public Holidays Act 36 of 1994, set to reflect the post-apartheid constitutional order. The list includes Human Rights Day on 21 March, Freedom Day on 27 April commemorating the 1994 election, Workers' Day on 1 May, Youth Day on 16 June commemorating the 1976 Soweto uprising, National Women's Day on 9 August, Heritage Day on 24 September, the Day of Reconciliation on 16 December, plus New Year's Day, Good Friday, Family Day (Easter Monday), Christmas Day and Day of Goodwill on 26 December. Election days are declared one-off public holidays each cycle.

This matters because the working-day total is not spread evenly. Some months in South Africa 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 South Africa holiday calendar for 1979. 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 South Africa (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.