Holiday weekends mean closed doors for most practices, and that's the right call for you and your staff. It's still worth understanding, in real numbers, what a closed Monday actually costs, not to second-guess the decision to close, but to make sure that cost is accounted for rather than just absorbed without ever being calculated.

A practice closed for a holiday isn't just losing that one day's worth of visits. If your schedule normally runs close to capacity, a closed Monday often means those patients get pushed to later in the week rather than lost entirely, which softens the impact more than a straight day-of revenue loss would suggest. But if your schedule has open slots most weeks, a closed holiday is closer to a pure loss, since there wasn't overflow demand to absorb those patients into other days anyway.

Fixed costs don't take the day off just because the practice is closed. Rent, loan payments, and any salaried staff continue accruing regardless of whether the doors are open, which means a closed day still carries real cost even without a single patient walking through.

This is a small example of a bigger habit worth building: actually calculating the cost of decisions like this instead of treating them as obviously fine because "everyone closes for Labor Day." Sometimes the numbers confirm what felt obvious. Sometimes they reveal that a practice with lighter scheduling might benefit from staying open with reduced hours, or that a practice running near capacity genuinely doesn't lose much by closing.

Neither answer is right or wrong universally. What matters is making the call with actual numbers behind it rather than assumption, especially as you're thinking ahead to how you'll handle other closures throughout the year, whether that's holidays, continuing education, or planned time off.

If you've never actually calculated what a closed day costs your specific practice, that's a useful number to have heading into a fall and winter with several more holidays ahead.

Jeremy Brewer is the founder of 911 Bookkeepers LLC in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 911 Bookkeepers partners with MBJA Accounting Service to give chiropractic and MDVIP practices clean, current financials. He is a Xero Certified Advisor.