Today is not included
A date tomorrow shows one day, not two. The count is the number of whole days you still have to get through, which is the figure a calendar gives you.
Plenty of people count the other way, so every page also shows the inclusive total underneath. Neither is wrong; they answer slightly different questions.
Everything is UK time
Counts are calculated in Europe/London, not in your device timezone, so everyone gets the same answer. Today, that is Tuesday 28 July 2026.
Days are compared as calendar dates rather than as elapsed time. That matters twice a year: when the clocks change, one day is 23 hours long and another is 25, and counting elapsed hours would put the answer out by one. The hour totals we show are the real figures, so a span crossing a clock change will not be an exact multiple of 24.
Working days exclude bank holidays
Working-day counts remove Saturdays, Sundays and England & Wales bank holidays. Most countdown sites remove only weekends, which makes their figures wrong for anyone planning around a UK deadline.
Bank holidays are worked out from the rules rather than kept in a list, including Easter, the first and last Mondays of the relevant months, and the substitute weekdays that follow when a fixed holiday lands on a weekend. Scotland and Northern Ireland differ from England and Wales, and those differences are noted where they change an answer.
Recurring dates roll forward
Each page answers for the next occurrence of that date. Ask in July how long until 1st March and you are told about next March, with the year shown so there is no ambiguity.
29th February rolls to the next leap year rather than to 1st March. Dates that do not exist at all, such as 31st April, have no page.
Weeks and week numbers
Weeks run Monday to Sunday and week numbers follow ISO 8601, which is the British convention. Where a countdown divides evenly by seven we say so, because it means the target falls on the same weekday as today.