workalendar

What it is and what it does

Workalendar is a Python library that maintains holiday calendars for countries and regions worldwide and provides utilities to work with working days. It lets you query whether a specific date is a working day (accounting for weekends and holidays), retrieve lists of holidays for a given year, and perform arithmetic on dates by adding or subtracting working days. The library bundles pre-computed astronomical values for calendars that depend on equinoxes or solar terms (such as Asian calendars) for years 1991–2051, with optional support for computing these values dynamically via the astronomy extra.

The package is built on date utilities (python-dateutil), lunar and solar calendar libraries (lunardate, convertdate, pyluach), and timezone support (tzdata, backports.zoneinfo, importlib-metadata). It covers a broad geographic scope—Europe, the Americas, Asia, Oceania, and Africa—with support for regional and sub-regional calendars (e.g., Swiss cantons, US states, Brazilian cities). The library is marked production-ready but carries a caveat that some calendars may not be 100% accurate, particularly Islamic calendars, and not all countries are yet supported.

Use it for:

• Calculate SLA deadlines by adding working days to a ticket creation date, excluding weekends and country-specific holidays.
• Validate whether a given date falls on a working day for payroll, scheduling, or business logic in multi-country applications.
• Generate holiday lists for a year to populate calendars, planning tools, or HR systems for a specific country or region.
• Compute business day offsets for financial settlement dates, delivery windows, or project timelines across different jurisdictions.
• Build international scheduling systems that respect local holidays and working-day conventions without hardcoding dates.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Workalendar provides holiday calendars and working-day calculations for countries and regions worldwide, letting you check if a date is a working day, list holidays, and compute date offsets across non-working days.

Yes, if you need working-day arithmetic or holiday lookups for one or more countries. The package is production-stable, has low install friction, carries no known vulnerabilities, and covers a wide geographic scope. However, maintenance is dormant (last release January 2023), so be aware that calendar updates may lag behind official changes; verify accuracy for mission-critical use cases against official sources.

Install

workalendar on PyPI

pip install workalendar

uv add workalendar

poetry add workalendar

Installing workalendar

Before you install

Low install friction: pure Python wheel with seven runtime dependencies (date utilities, lunar/solar calendar support, timezone data). Maintenance is dormant—last release was January 2023, over a year ago, though the repository remains active with recent commits and no archived status.

License in practice

MIT License is permissive; you may use, modify, and distribute this package freely in commercial and open-source projects with minimal restrictions.

Quickstart

pip install workalendar

from datetime import date
from workalendar.europe import France
cal = France()
print(cal.is_working_day(date(2012, 12, 25)))  # False (Christmas)
print(cal.add_working_days(date(2012, 12, 23), 5))  # date(2012, 12, 31)

Requires Python 3.7+. On Python 3.7–3.8, backports.zoneinfo and tzdata (Windows only) are conditional dependencies; Python 3.9+ uses stdlib zoneinfo.

Verify before relying

• Accuracy of Islamic calendar and other computed holidays relative to official religious authority decisions
• Completeness of calendar coverage—documentation notes some calendars may not be fully up-to-date and not all countries are covered

Package facts

Evidence: workalendar-17.0.0-py3-none-any.whl

Tags

More Utilities packages