Trading days calculator
How many days is the market really open between two dates? Weekends and holidays come out. You get the trading days, the calendar days and the share of a trading year.
| Market holiday skipped | Holiday |
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How it works: it walks through every day from the start date to the end date. It counts a day when the US stock market is open: not a Saturday or Sunday, and not on the NYSE holiday list. Short days, when the market closes at 1:00 p.m., still count as trading days. Calendar days are simply the days between the two dates. The share of a year is the trading days divided by 252, the number traders use for a typical year. Pick "start counting the day after" to count the days left from today, the way you'd count to an option's expiration.
Why traders count trading days
A calendar month has about 30 days. The market is open on only about 21 of them. Prices only move on days the market is open, so trading days are a truer clock. Traders use them to measure how long a trade has left, to compare one month with another, and to turn daily numbers into yearly ones. That last one is where 252 comes from: it's about how many days the market is open in a year. Some years have a day or two more or less. Every holiday for the year is in the economic calendar for 2027.
Trading days and your options
An option loses time value every day, weekends included. But the stock can only move on trading days. So an option with 10 calendar days left over a long weekend has fewer chances to move than the count suggests. When a holiday falls on an expiration Friday, the option expires the Thursday before. That one day can change your plan. Count both ways before you sell. More in days to expiration and what happens to options on a market holiday.
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