The countdown to the weekend is the one most people mean when they say they are counting down at all. In Britain it ends on Friday evening rather than at midnight, because that is when the weekend genuinely starts — the last email sent, the office emptying out, the school gates closing for two days.
What follows is the only stretch of the week the whole country is broadly free at the same time, and an enormous amount is packed into it: football, weddings, markets, family visits, the garden, and the entire leisure economy compressed into roughly sixty hours. That concentration is also why the motorways are at their worst on Friday afternoon and again on Sunday evening.
Bank holidays change its shape. Almost all of Britain's are Mondays — Easter Monday, the early May holiday, the spring holiday at the end of May, the August one — so the usual reward is a three-day weekend rather than a day off stranded midweek. Scotland's calendar differs, with 2 January and a summer holiday at the start of August rather than the end of it.
The figure here recalculates continuously and never shows more than a week. Checked on a Monday morning it is at its longest; checked on a Friday afternoon it is already down to hours.
Common questions
When does this countdown treat the weekend as starting?
Friday evening, the end of the standard British working week, rather than midnight on Saturday morning.
Why are so many British bank holidays on a Monday?
Most are fixed by statute to a particular Monday, which produces a three-day weekend instead of a break stranded midweek.
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