Want to show US Holidays in your iOS Calendar? There are a few ways to accomplish this, and we’ll cover the two simplest methods. First is a direct subscription to the official US holidays calendar offered from Apple, and the other syncs the same calendar from a Mac that has the feature enabled. For the time being this is necessary, because there currently is not a direct toggle to show or hide holidays in the Calendar app on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
We’re focusing on holidays in the USA for this example, but below there are links that include other nation calendars as well. If you have a direct link from Apple’s calendars for your nation, be sure to share it in the comments as well.
How to Subscribe to US Holiday Calendar on iOS
Note that newer versions of iOS Calendar app have a simple toggle setting for showing or removing Holiday Calendars on the iPhone or iPad. The steps below apply to subscribing to calendars that are not shown in that simple toggle list.
Ok let’s get to to showing holidays in the Calendar app for iOS…
Option 1: Subscribe to the US Holiday Calendar on iPhone / iPad Directly
The URL below is the US Holiday calendar feed directly from Apple:
https://p24-calendars.icloud.com/holiday/US_en.ics
You can copy and paste that into an email and send it yourself, or if you’re on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, simply do the following instead:
Yes that is a direct link to the calendar file from Apple, you can preview the link if you want to be sure it’s accurate. Tap on “Subscribe” when the option comes up:
Pull up your Calendar app in iOS and you should now see the holidays visible as they are in the screen shot below:
Note this sample screenshot shows holidays twice while in list view or day view because the feed has been subscribed to directly as outlined above, but also synced from the Mac as outlined in the next step. Do one or the other, not both, unless you want holidays to show up twice like this.
Option 2: Subscribe to Calendars on a Mac & Sync with iCloud
If you followed our tip to have holidays displayed in the Calendar app for the Mac and you use iCloud with the same Apple ID as that used by your iPhone / iPad, the holidays will sync automatically to your iOS device from the Mac. This is super easy if you have a Mac
if you’ve already shown holidays in Calendar for Mac OS X and you use iCloud,
What about calendars for other nations holidays?
Obviously calendar holidays differ per country, so if you’re in the UK you probably don’t care to celebrate the US 4th of July (or maybe you do). The simplest way to get your respective countries holiday calendar is to use 2nd option outlined above, syncing the holidays from your Mac to your iOS device.
The Apple Calendars page has several to choose from, and this link from the UK has bank holidays available to download.
Readers are also welcome to share the direct iCloud Calendar URL’s from Apple in the comments, be sure to include the nation of the holiday calendar.
We got a few questions about this after showing how to access the new List View in iOS 7.1 because the screenshots show US Holidays… hopefully this answers those questions!
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