Friday-Saturday Weekends: Which Countries Use Them and Why It Matters

A contract says the supplier will respond within three business days. You are in London, the supplier is in Riyadh, and you send the request on a Friday. Whose business days count? In London, Friday is a working day and Sunday is not. In Riyadh it is the other way round. The answer changes the due date, and the confusion is avoidable if you know which countries keep which weekend.

Who has a Friday-Saturday weekend

Friday is the day of congregational prayer in Islam, and many Muslim-majority countries build their weekend around it. The most common pattern today is a Friday and Saturday weekend with a Sunday to Thursday working week. Countries that use it, at least for government and most of the private sector, include:

• Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman
• Egypt, Jordan and Iraq
• Algeria
• Bangladesh, for government offices

Israel also works Sunday to Thursday, with the Jewish Sabbath running from Friday evening to Saturday evening; many workplaces keep Friday as a short day or a day off. Other Muslim-majority countries, including Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Malaysia (in most states) and Indonesia, use a Saturday and Sunday weekend.

This list is not frozen. Private employers sometimes set their own schedules, and governments do change weekends, so check the current rule for any country you rely on.

Countries that switched

Several Gulf states used a Thursday and Friday weekend until the 2000s or early 2010s and then moved to Friday and Saturday, partly to gain an extra shared working day with markets that work Monday to Friday. Saudi Arabia and Oman both made that move in 2013.

The United Arab Emirates went further. From 1 January 2022 the federal government adopted a Saturday and Sunday weekend, with Monday to Thursday as full working days and Friday as a half day so that staff can attend Friday prayers. Private sector employers were left free to choose their own working week, and many followed the government pattern. The emirate of Sharjah adopted a four-day week for its government, with Friday, Saturday and Sunday off. In practice, "the UAE weekend" now depends on whether you are dealing with a federal body, a particular emirate or a specific private company.

Worked example: shared working days

Take a team with members in London (Monday to Friday), Riyadh (Sunday to Thursday) and a Dubai partner on the federal pattern (Monday to Thursday full days, Friday morning).

Each location works five days, or four and a half in Dubai. But the days all three share are Monday to Thursday: four per week. Over a four-week month with no public holidays, that is 4 × 4 = 16 shared days, compared with 20 working days in London alone. One working day in five is unavailable for joint work before you even consider time zones or public holidays.

Time zones then shrink the overlap further. Riyadh is three hours ahead of UTC and Dubai four, while London moves between UTC and UTC+1. On a Friday, London's working morning coincides with Dubai's half day and Riyadh's weekend. The team overlap planner shows the shared hours for any combination of locations.

Worked example: counting a deadline

Back to the three-business-day response. The request goes out on Friday.

• Counting in London business days: Monday (1), Tuesday (2), Wednesday (3). Due Wednesday.
• Counting in Riyadh business days: Friday and Saturday are the weekend, so Sunday (1), Monday (2), Tuesday (3). Due Tuesday.

Send the same request on a Thursday instead and the two counts happen to agree: London gives Friday, Monday, Tuesday; Riyadh gives Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Both land on Tuesday. The day you send can decide whether the two parties disagree. If a contract refers to business days, it should say whose. Check your contract or local rules, and use the add business days tool with the right country selected.

Other cross-border effects

• Payments and banking: transfers between countries with different weekends can only settle on days when both banking systems are open. A payment initiated on a Thursday in London may not settle until Monday.
• Support coverage: a Sunday shift may be needed if you serve customers in Sunday-to-Thursday countries.
• Public holidays: a holiday falling on a Friday is a lost weekday in one country and a weekend non-event in another, so holiday counts do not compare directly. Our methodology page explains how weekend definitions affect working-day totals.
• Scheduled jobs: automated reports set to run "every weekday" need a country-specific definition of weekday.

Public holidays on top of weekends

Mixed weekends interact with public holidays in ways that are easy to miss. Eid holidays in Gulf countries are usually announced as a block of days, and when part of that block overlaps the local weekend, the number of working days lost depends on which weekend applies. Suppose a four-day Eid holiday runs from Thursday to Sunday in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. For a Riyadh office working Sunday to Thursday, it removes Thursday and Sunday. For a Dubai office on the federal Monday-to-Friday pattern, it removes Thursday and the Friday half day. Each loses a similar amount of time, yet the working days the two offices still share that week are only Monday to Wednesday. Count the shared days for holiday weeks separately rather than relying on the normal weekly figure.

Checklist for teams with mixed weekends

1. Record the actual working week for each partner, not just the country default; ask in the UAE in particular.
2. Book recurring meetings on the days every location shares, usually Monday to Thursday.
3. Write "business days in [country]" into contracts and service levels.
4. Configure scheduling and payroll tools with each country's weekend, not a global Saturday-Sunday rule.
5. Review the setup when a government announces a working-week change; it has happened several times in the region since the 2000s. Our country pages list the current weekend pattern alongside holidays.