Every answer at once
There are only seven possible answers to this question, so here they all are. The last column counts the Monday-to-Friday days you still have in front of you, including today — the number most people actually mean when they ask.
| If today is | Days until Friday | Days until Friday next week | Mon–Fri workdays left (incl. today) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sunday | 5 | 12 | 5 |
| Monday | 4 | 11 | 5 |
| Tuesday | 3 | 10 | 4 |
| Wednesday | 2 | 9 | 3 |
| Thursday | 1 | 8 | 2 |
| Friday | today | 7 | 1 |
| Saturday | 6 | 13 | 5 |
Two rows deserve a second look. On Saturday the answer is 6, not 1 — Friday has just gone, so the next one is nearly a full week away, and that is the single most common off-by-six error in weekday counting. And on Friday itself the count is today rather than 0 or 7: the tool says so explicitly instead of making you guess which convention it picked.
Worked example: Wednesday at 2 p.m.
Say it is Wednesday afternoon. The calendar count is 2 days until Friday — two midnights stand between now and Friday morning. The live timer underneath tells a different and equally true story: from 2 p.m. Wednesday to midnight at the start of Friday is 34 hours (10 hours left of Wednesday plus all 24 of Thursday). If what you really want is the end of the working week, add the workday: Friday 5 p.m. is 51 hours away, or 2 days and 3 hours. This is the gap the big number and the ticking timer are designed to show side by side — one answers "which day", the other "how long".
Worked example: counting Fridays, not days
A different question hides inside this one: how many Fridays are left this year? Because 52 × 7 = 364, a common year holds 52 Fridays plus one extra day, and a leap year 52 plus two. So every year has either 52 or 53 Fridays — 53 only when January 1 falls on a Friday, or, in a leap year, on a Thursday or a Friday. If you want the count from today, set the exact date of the last Friday of the year in the main calculator and divide the day count by 7.
Which day starts the week?
"Days until Friday" is stable, but "which day of the week is it" is not a universal constant. The ISO 8601 standard, used across Europe and in most software, numbers Monday as day 1 and Sunday as day 7, which makes Friday day 5 and the weekend the tail of the week. The United States, Canada and Japan conventionally start the week on Sunday, so their calendars print Friday in the sixth column. JavaScript — and therefore this page's arithmetic — uses a third convention internally, numbering Sunday 0 through Saturday 6. None of that changes the answer: the gap between today and the coming Friday is the same number of sunrises whichever column your wall calendar puts it in.
Friday the 13th, and why some years get three
A month contains a Friday the 13th exactly when that month begins on a Sunday — count forward: Sunday the 1st, Sunday the 8th, then Friday the 13th. That single rule explains the superstition's odd rhythm. Because the twelve month-starts can never all miss the same weekday, every year has at least one Friday the 13th, and never more than three. Getting three requires three months that begin on the same weekday. In a leap year that trio is January, April and July: January 1 to April 1 spans 31 + 29 + 31 = 91 days, and April 1 to July 1 spans 30 + 31 + 30 = 91 days — 13 weeks each time. In a common year the trio is February, March and November instead, because February 1 to March 1 is 28 days (4 weeks) and March 1 to November 1 is 245 days (35 weeks).
Related countdowns
Friday is the doorway, not the destination: most people asking this are really counting days until the weekend, which starts one day later. For fixed-date targets, try days until Halloween or days until Christmas, and for the seasonal version of the same impulse, days until summer. Anything with an actual date on it belongs in the days until calculator, which also handles past dates and makes a link you can share.