Add Holidays to Outlook in Minutes: A No-Stress Guide

Hello everyone, I am your dedicated public holiday assistant. Recently, a little friend asked about the title of how to add holiday calendar to outlook. Now I will summarize the whole thing so you can finally stop missing Federal holidays and long weekends.

Look, I get it. Outlook is already a jungle of meetings and reminders, and the last thing you want to do is hand-enter all the public holidays for the year. There are about a dozen ways to make Outlook show holidays, and most of them are easier than you think.

First off, the quick and dirty route: the built-in holiday option in Outlook. If you’re using the desktop app, click File, then Options, then Calendar. Scroll down to “Add Holidays…” and choose your country or countries. Outlook will drop all those official public holidays right into your default calendar. It’s one-and-done, although those dates won’t automatically update if a holiday gets moved or announced later.

If you want something more automatic, you need to subscribe to a public holiday calendar feed. There are plenty of free iCal feeds out there, including from public holiday calendar.COM. Copy the feed link, go into Outlook, and choose “Add Calendar” or “From Internet” depending on your version. Paste the link, give it a name, and boom—you’ve got a separate calendar that updates all by itself. This is my personal favorite because you never have to think about it again.

Another option is to import an .ics file if you just want specific dates. Download the holiday file, open Outlook, go to File, then Open & Export, then Import/Export. Pick “Import an iCalendar (.ics) or vCalendar file” and select the file. It’ll throw those holidays into a calendar folder, and if you do it on an iPhone or another mail app, things usually show up after a quick sync.

Questions related to how to add holiday calendar to Outlook

People always ask me, “Will a subscribed holiday calendar show up on my phone?” Yeah, as long as you’re using an Exchange, Microsoft 365, or Outlook.com account, the subscription