What does 5 to 7 business days mean?

Weekends are out, and so are the holidays that business observes. What it doesn't tell you, and what actually decides when your thing arrives, is which day the count starts on and whose calendar is being used. Those two answers can move the date by most of a week.

Does the day I order count?

Almost never. Order on a Monday afternoon and day one is usually Tuesday. Most sellers begin counting from the first full business day after the order is accepted, and many have a daily cut-off time, often mid-afternoon, after which an order is treated as arriving the next day.

Work the Monday example through:

• Order Monday at 4pm. The cut-off was 2pm, so the order lands Tuesday.
• Day one is Wednesday.
• Seven business days from Wednesday, skipping two weekends, is the Friday of the following week.

That's eleven calendar days from an order placed on a Monday, and nothing anywhere on the page said eleven.

Whose holidays count?

The seller's. Not yours, and not necessarily your country's. A warehouse in another region closes on days your calendar doesn't mark, and an international order can pass through two sets of holidays.

This is the largest single source of "it's late and nobody can tell me why" around any national holiday, and around long weekends in particular, when one closed day removes a fifth of the week.

Processing time or transit time?

A quoted window often covers only one of them, and they're different clocks. "Ships in 5 to 7 business days" means it leaves the warehouse in that window and then travels. "Delivers in 5 to 7 business days" means something quite different. When the two are quoted separately they add, and when a page quotes one number it's worth finding out which clock it describes.

Carriers count differently too. Many quote transit in business days but deliver on Saturdays, so the two calendars inside one shipment don't match.

Common questions

What should I ask the seller?

Three things: when day one starts, what the cut-off time is, and whether the window covers processing, transit, or both. With those you can count it yourself and get a date you can plan around. Without them the window's a range of ranges.

Is a business day always Monday to Friday?

For most retailers, yes. Some warehouses run six days, some carriers deliver Saturdays, and a business in another country may observe a different working week entirely. If the date matters, ask rather than assume.

Does the window include the day it arrives?

Generally the window ends on the day of delivery, so the seventh business day is the last day they expect you to have it rather than the day it leaves. That's the opposite convention from a hotel stay, where the last night is the night before checkout, which is one reason the phrase trips people who move between the two.

Why do people get this wrong so often?

Because skipping two weekends by eye is harder than it looks, and because the quoted window sounds like calendar days when it isn't. If the date matters, count it rather than estimating.

Related

The days between dates tool counts business days and lets you enter the holidays that apply to your case. The date calculator adds or subtracts a business-day amount from one start date. Does the end date count covers whether the first and last days are included at all, and the date and time tools hub has the rest.