Academic Semester Days Calculator

Enter the first and last day of the term and how many non-teaching weekdays it contains. A US fall semester from 25 August to 15 December 2026 spans 113 calendar days, 32 of them weekends; with 6 holidays that leaves 75 instructional days — the 15-week Carnegie baseline.

An instructional day is a scheduled day on which teaching, reading or examinations take place. The count starts from the full calendar span, both end dates included, removes every Saturday and Sunday, and then removes the non-teaching weekdays you enter. With the preset term — 25 August to 15 December 2026 — that is 113 calendar days, 32 of them at the weekend, so 81 weekdays remain; six non-teaching weekdays bring it to 75. That number is not a coincidence. Seventy-five is the Carnegie baseline for a 15-week semester on a five-day week, the figure US credit-hour accounting is built around, and it is why the old calculator used exactly this term as its default. Two things this page does not do. It has no holiday calendar of its own: how many teaching days a Thanksgiving week or a reading period costs differs by institution, so you enter that number yourself. And it counts days across the whole term, not the meetings of a single course — a Tuesday/Thursday class meets on a fraction of these days. The convention itself is regional. German terms are cut into a Vorlesungszeit of roughly 14 to 15 weeks next to a lecture-free period, and workload there is measured in Semesterwochenstunden rather than in days, so the 75-day yardstick does not carry over even though the arithmetic does.