Python / Pandas / Numpy - Direct calculation of the number of working days between two dates, excluding holidays

Question

Is there a better or more direct way to calculate this than the following?

# 1. Set up the start and end date for which you want to calculate the # number of business days excluding holidays. start_date = '01JAN1986' end_date = '31DEC1987' start_date = datetime.datetime.strptime(start_date, '%d%b%Y') end_date = datetime.datetime.strptime(end_date, '%d%b%Y') # 2. Generate a list of holidays over this period from pandas.tseries.holiday import USFederalHolidayCalendar calendar = USFederalHolidayCalendar() holidays = calendar.holidays(start_date, end_date) holidays 

What gives pandas.tseries.index.DatetimeIndex

 DatetimeIndex(['1986-01-01', '1986-01-20', '1986-02-17', '1986-05-26', '1986-07-04', '1986-09-01', '1986-10-13', '1986-11-11', '1986-11-27', '1986-12-25', '1987-01-01', '1987-01-19', '1987-02-16', '1987-05-25', '1987-07-03', '1987-09-07', '1987-10-12', '1987-11-11', '1987-11-26', '1987-12-25'], dtype='datetime64[ns]', freq=None, tz=None) 

But you need a list for numpy busday_count

 holiday_date_list = holidays.date.tolist() 

Then, with and without holidays, you get:

 np.busday_count(start_date.date(), end_date.date()) >>> 521 np.busday_count(start_date.date(), end_date.date(), holidays = holiday_date_list) >>> 501 

There are several other questions that are a bit similar, but usually work with the pandas Series or Dataframes ( Get working days between start and end dates using pandas , Counting business days between two series )