You send a contract to a client on a Thursday, with a · “response within 5 business days · ” clause. The following Monday is a bank holiday. Does the deadline move to Wednesday or Thursday? The answer depends on whether the contract wording treats bank holidays as business days — and in most UK contexts, they are not.
Key takeaways
- Bank holidays commonly extend working-day deadlines by one or more days.
- England & Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland each have different bank holiday dates.
- Ireland and the United States use separate public holiday calendars entirely.
- Always check the specific contract, SLA, or policy wording — not all organisations treat bank holidays the same way.
Usually, no
Bank holidays and public holidays usually do not count as business days where the organisation is closed. This is especially common for banks, public services, delivery estimates, and formal response deadlines.
But check the wording
Some companies use business days to mean weekdays only, while others explicitly exclude public holidays. If a policy says 'working days excluding public holidays', then bank holidays should not be counted.
Example
If a five-business-day deadline includes a Monday bank holiday, the deadline is usually pushed out by one extra day.
This is one of the main reasons manual counting can go wrong around Christmas, Easter, and national holidays.
Useful official resources
These sources are directly relevant to the date, public holiday, delivery, SLA, or complaint-handling topic covered in this article.
UK bank holidays at a glance (2026)
These are the public holidays that may be excluded from business day counts under most UK policies:
| Holiday | Date (2026) | Day | Applies to |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Year's Day | 1 January | Thursday | UK-wide |
| St Patrick's Day | 17 March | Tuesday | Northern Ireland |
| Good Friday | 3 April | Friday | UK-wide |
| Easter Monday | 6 April | Monday | England, Wales, NI |
| Early May bank holiday | 4 May | Monday | UK-wide |
| Spring bank holiday | 25 May | Monday | UK-wide |
| Battle of the Boyne | 13 July | Monday | Northern Ireland |
| Summer bank holiday | 31 August | Monday | England, Wales, NI |
| St Andrew's Day | 30 November | Monday | Scotland |
| Christmas Day | 25 December | Friday | UK-wide |
| Boxing Day | 26 December | Saturday | UK-wide |
| Boxing Day substitute | 28 December | Monday | UK-wide |
Dates are sourced from GOV.UK bank holidays and may vary slightly between years. Substitute holidays can shift the observed date when a bank holiday falls on a weekend. This is why a calculator that uses the correct country calendar is more reliable than manual counting.
The calculator can exclude public holidays for the UK, Ireland, and the United States.
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