Add or subtract working days
One action does both. A positive number moves forward, a negative number moves back.
The day-0 convention
The start date is not counted. The number you enter is how many working days you move.
Monday + 1 working day = Tuesday
Monday + 5 working days = the following Monday
Monday + 0 working days = Monday
Some organisations count the other way, where the start date is day 1 and "three working days" from Monday ends on Wednesday. If that is your convention, enter one fewer.
This is the single most common source of confusion with any working-day calculator. It is worth agreeing on it with whoever will read the deadline.
Subtracting
A negative number counts backwards. This is how you build reminders:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Start date | {{issue.duedate}} |
| Working days to add | -3 |
Three working days before the due date, skipping weekends and holidays. Pair it with a scheduled rule and a comparison to today to send a nudge that actually lands with three working days left, not three calendar days.
Subtraction is the exact mirror of addition. Moving forward five working days and then back five always returns you to where you started.
When the start date is not a working day
The adjustment setting decides what happens before any counting begins:
| Setting | Saturday 26 December becomes |
|---|---|
| Leave it where it is | Saturday 26 December |
| Move it to the next working day | Monday 28 December |
| Move it to the previous working day | Wednesday 23 December |
That last one skips back over Friday 25 and Thursday 24, because both are holidays.
The adjustment happens first, then the working days are counted. Rolling Saturday forward to Monday and then adding one working day gives Tuesday.
With a non-zero number of working days you always land on a working day, whatever the adjustment setting — counting forward from a Saturday, the first working day you pass is the first working day. The setting only changes the answer when you add zero working days, or when it moves the starting point far enough to change what you pass.
What comes back
| Output | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Result date | The answer, as year-month-day. This is the one you usually want. |
| Result date time | The same date with the original time of day, if you supplied one. |
| Days moved | Calendar days between start and result. Useful in a condition. |
| Working days moved | Echoes what you asked for. |
| Calendar name | Which calendar was used. Handy in a comment. |
| Was adjusted | True if the adjustment setting moved your start date. |
Was adjusted is worth using: add a condition on it and post a comment saying
"started from the next working day" so the person reading the ticket knows why the
date is what it is.
Limits
Up to 5,000 working days in either direction. Anything beyond that is refused, because at that size it is almost always the wrong field mapped in rather than a real deadline.
There is also a ceiling on how far ahead a date can go: about 19 years from today. That is not our limit — Jira's own date handling rewrites the century beyond that point, so a deadline in 2046 would be stored as 1946 without any error. Rather than let a wrong date through silently, we stop the rule and say so. The limit moves forward by one year every year.