How to Add Holidays to Google Calendar (Any Country)

How to add your country's holidays

If your holiday calendar is missing, or you removed it once and want it back, here is the full path, which Google documents for the computer version (Google Calendar Help).

Step 1: Open Google Calendar on a computer. Go to calendar.google.com.

Step 2: Open Settings. Click the gear icon, then Settings.

Step 3: Browse calendars of interest. In the left column, choose Add calendar, then Browse calendars of interest.

Step 4: Pick your region. Under Regional holidays, find your holiday calendar and open its drop-down to select which holidays you want.

Step 5: Go back to the calendar. The holidays appear under Other calendars in the left sidebar, with their own color you can change like any calendar.

You only do this once per Google account. Every device signed in to that account, including the Google Calendar app and an iPhone set up to sync Google calendars, picks it up.

Public holidays only, or observances too?

By default, Google shows "public holidays and other observances" (Google Calendar Help). Observances are days that are marked but are not days off: think Valentine's Day, Mother's Day or Halloween in the US.

Which one you want depends on how you use the calendar:

• Public holidays only keeps the calendar clean. Choose this for a work calendar, where the only question that matters is "is the office closed?"
• Public holidays and other observances is better for a personal or family calendar, where knowing that Mother's Day is Sunday is exactly the point.

You can change this choice at any time from the same drop-down, so there is no cost to trying one and switching.

Add another country's holidays

If you work with a team abroad, have family in another country, or are planning a trip, add that country's holidays next to your own. In Browse calendars of interest, click Browse all and check the box next to each country or region you want (Google Calendar Help).

Two practical tips:

• Give each country its own color. When a US and a French holiday calendar sit side by side, color is the fastest way to tell "my day off" from "their day off."
• Watch the time zone of all-day events. Holidays are all-day events, so they follow the date, not the clock. If you schedule a call with someone in Tokyo on the evening before a Japanese holiday, it may already be the holiday there. Our guide to Google Calendar time zones explains how to show a second time zone so this is visible at a glance.

Hide a single holiday you don't need

Sometimes you want the holiday calendar but not one specific day. Google lets you hide a single holiday: select it on the calendar, click the trash icon, then choose Hide this holiday (Google Calendar Help). The rest of the holiday calendar stays as it was.

This is cleaner than deleting the whole calendar, and much cleaner than creating your own copy of each holiday by hand.

Google Calendar holidays not showing? Check these

When holidays are missing, the cause is almost always one of these:

• The calendar is unchecked. In the left sidebar, under Other calendars, make sure the box next to the holiday calendar is ticked. An unchecked calendar is still in your account but hidden from view.
• You chose public holidays only. If an observance like Halloween is missing, the drop-down may be set to public holidays. Switch it to include other observances.
• The holiday was hidden. If you used Hide this holiday earlier, that one day stays hidden until you change it.
• Your phone isn't showing the calendar. On iPhone, Google calendars come through the account you added in Settings, and each calendar can be shown or hidden in the Calendar app's calendar list. If the holidays show on the web but not on your phone, start with our Google Calendar on iPhone setup guide.

School holidays and other calendars you can subscribe to

National holiday calendars do not include school breaks, local events or your sports club's schedule. For those, look for a calendar the school or club publishes. Many offer a link you can add to Google Calendar: on a computer, next to Other calendars, click Add other calendars, choose From URL, paste the link and click Add calendar (Google Calendar Help). Google notes this works only if the calendar is public.

If no such calendar exists, a shared family calendar is the next best option: one parent enters term dates once, everyone else sees them. Our guide on how to share a Google Calendar walks through permissions so the right people can edit. And for anything that repeats on a known pattern, like a weekly practice through the term, recurring events save you from entering each date.

Planning the holiday season, November 2026 to January 2027

Holidays on the calendar are useful; holidays you have planned around are better. The end-of-year stretch is crowded, and many people feel it: in the American Psychiatric Association's Healthy Minds poll from November 2025, 41% of US adults said they expected to feel more stressed this holiday season than the last (American Psychiatric Association). A calendar will not fix that, but it can take the guesswork out of the logistics.

The key dates in the US this year:

A few calendar moves that pay off:

Block your shopping windows. If you plan to buy gifts on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, put a one-hour block on the calendar with your list in the event notes. It turns a vague intention into a slot and keeps sales from eating a whole day.

Put travel days on the calendar as events, not notes. Add each flight or long drive with its time and confirmation number in the description. Travel days are rarely "free" days, and seeing them blocked stops you from scheduling a call during a layover.

Schedule calls with family abroad in their time zone. If you call relatives in another country on Christmas Day, check the time difference before you send the invite. Showing a second time zone in Google Calendar makes this a glance rather than a calculation.

Keep a buffer week before New Year. Leave the days between Christmas and New Year's Day as light as you can. It gives slack for anything that slips from December and room to set up January before it starts.

Add the January restart. Create the first workday back, school's return and any January deadlines now, while you remember them. Future you, on January 2, will be grateful.