To set special hours on Google Business Profile, open your profile, go to Edit profile, choose Hours, and select Edit next to “Special hours.” Pick the date, enter your open and close times (or leave it marked Closed), and save. Do it for every holiday, event day, or short closure before it happens, so customers searching Google Search and Maps see the right hours and call you instead of the next company on the list.
This guide walks through the exact steps, the rules Google sets (including the six-day limit), how to handle many locations at once, and what to do when your special hours do not show up.
TL;DR
- Special hours live under Edit profile > Hours > Special hours. Add a date, mark it open or closed, add times, and save.
- Special hours cover temporary changes of up to 6 days in a row. Longer or open-ended closures should be marked as Temporarily closed.
- Special hours only display when your regular hours are set to “Open with main hours.”
- Multiple locations can be updated through the bulk upload spreadsheet’s “Special hours” column.
- Confirm hours even for holidays when you keep your normal schedule, so customers see that the information is accurate.
Table of Contents
- What special hours are, and why they matter for service businesses
- How to add special hours step by step
- The 6-day rule: special hours vs. temporarily closed
- Holiday hours checklist for home and professional services
- Updating special hours for multiple locations
- Why your special hours may not show up
- Special hours and the rest of your profile
- Our perspective
- Get hours, reviews, and rankings handled together
- Frequently asked questions
- Sources
What special hours are, and why they matter for service businesses
Special hours are temporary changes to your regular schedule. Google defines them as adjustments to your hours of operation, or a closure, lasting 6 days in a row or fewer. Typical examples: Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, the Fourth of July, a staff training day, a trade show, or a weekend you are closing early for a company event.
For a local service business, the stakes are higher than for a restaurant that people walk past. An HVAC company, plumber, or roofer is often chosen from the map pack by someone with a problem right now. If Google shows you as open on a day your office is closed, the caller reaches voicemail and moves down the list. If Google shows you as closed on a day your dispatchers are actually taking emergency calls, you lose a lead you could have won.
Google’s own help pages say business hours are there so customers can plan visits and see accurate hours on Search and Maps. Accurate hours are also one of the simplest trust signals on a profile. They cost nothing and take minutes.
Special hours vs. regular hours vs. more hours
Three different settings often get mixed up:
| Setting | What it is for | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Regular (main) hours | Your normal weekly schedule | Mon to Fri, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. |
| Special hours | One-off changes of 6 days in a row or fewer | Closed on Thanksgiving, open 8 a.m. to noon on Christmas Eve |
| More hours | Service-specific schedules that differ from main hours | Senior hours, delivery, takeout |
Google separates special hours from “more hours,” which are meant for services with their own recurring times. If your 24/7 emergency line runs on a different schedule from your showroom or office, that is a regular-hours question, not a holiday question. Special hours are for the exception, not the pattern.
How to add special hours step by step
Google’s official instructions for special hours boil down to the following. Menu labels shift occasionally, so if yours looks slightly different, look for Hours under Edit profile.
- Open your Business Profile. Sign in to the Google account that manages the profile and search for your business name, or open it from Google Maps. You must be an owner or manager of the profile to change hours.
- Go to Edit profile, then Hours. This is the same area where your weekly schedule lives.
- Select Edit next to “Special hours.”
- Choose the date. Google often suggests upcoming holidays you can review. You can also select Add a date for anything else, such as a company event.
- Set open or closed. To show reduced or altered hours, uncheck Closed and enter the opening and closing times. To show you are closed that day, leave Closed checked.
- Add more windows if needed. If you break for midday or run a split shift, use More to add another time window to the same date.
- Click Save.
After saving, Google shows a message on your profile confirming the recent hours update. On mobile, customers can find a post confirming the change on the Updates tab, according to Google’s hours guidance.
Entering open, reduced, or closed hours
- Closed all day: Choose the date and leave the Closed box checked. Use this for days like Thanksgiving or Christmas Day if your office shuts down.
- Reduced hours: Uncheck Closed and enter the shortened window, for example 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve.
- Extended hours: Same method. If you add evening availability before a big storm or heat wave, enter the longer window.
- Open as usual: Google recommends confirming hours for official holidays even when they match your regular schedule, so customers see that the special-hours information is accurate. It is a small step that removes the “hours might differ” warning customers sometimes see on holidays.
The 6-day rule: special hours vs. temporarily closed
This is where many owners trip up. Special hours work for holidays, special events, and other exceptional circumstances when your business adjusts its hours or stays closed for up to 6 days in a row.
If you will be closed for 7 or more days in a row, or you do not know how long the closure will last, Google directs you to mark the business as Temporarily closed instead. Think of a fire at the shop, a remodel, or an extended owner absence.
A quick way to decide:
- Closed for the Fourth of July weekend: special hours.
- Closed the week between Christmas and New Year’s, 7 days or more: Temporarily closed. If you split it into dates with a gap that you are actually open, special hours can still apply to the stretches of 6 days or fewer.
- Closed for an unknown period after a staffing change: Temporarily closed.
For an HVAC or plumbing company that keeps an on-call line during holidays, the more accurate approach is usually special hours that reflect when someone really answers the phone. Do not list yourself as open if calls go unanswered; an unanswered call is worse than a call that was never made.
Holiday hours checklist for home and professional services
Rather than scrambling each November, build a recurring calendar. These are the dates most U.S. service businesses touch in a typical year:
- New Year’s Day
- Martin Luther King Jr. Day
- Presidents’ Day
- Memorial Day
- Juneteenth
- Independence Day (and the days around it when the Fourth falls midweek)
- Labor Day
- Thanksgiving Day and the day after
- Christmas Eve and Christmas Day
- New Year’s Eve
Add to that your own recurring exceptions: annual team meetings, inventory days, peak-season extended evenings, and any local holiday that matters in your service area.
A few practical habits help:
- Set holiday hours two to three weeks ahead. That gives edits time to appear and lets you catch a rejection before the holiday arrives.
- Match everything else. Your website footer, your phone greeting, and any social profiles should say the same thing as Google. Conflicting hours create more missed calls than the profile alone.
- Tell your team where to look. The office manager, the dispatcher, and the owner should all know who is responsible for updating the profile.
- Review the next-year dates in January. Floating holidays like Thanksgiving land on different dates each year, so enter the specific dates each time rather than assuming last year’s still apply.
Updating special hours for multiple locations
If you manage several branches or franchise locations, editing each profile by hand gets tedious. Google supports special hours through the bulk upload spreadsheet, using the “Special hours” column. You list the affected days and the special hours for each location and upload the file.
Two cautions from Google’s instructions: keep the spreadsheet in its correct structure and time formats, and do not leave empty columns or headings in the file, because that can erase existing data in those fields. Download a fresh copy of your current data before editing, change only the special hours, and re-upload.
Bulk edits are only as good as the data behind them. If locations have different holiday policies, such as a branch in a different time zone or one that stays open for emergencies, give each its own row rather than copying one holiday schedule across the board. Our guide to multi-location Google Business Profile setup and management covers how to keep that consistency across markets.
Why your special hours may not show up
You saved the change, but Google still shows the old hours. The most common causes:
Your regular hours are not set to “Open with main hours”
Special hours will not appear on your profile unless the business hours setting is “Open with main hours.” If the profile is set to another status, such as temporarily closed or no hours at all, the special hours stay hidden. Fix the main status first, then recheck.
You are not a manager on the profile
Only owners and managers can change hours. If an old agency, a former employee, or an unfamiliar account holds the profile, you may need to sort out access before any edit sticks. If you lost control of a listing, see our notes on Google Business Profile suspension and gathering evidence and the video verification checklist.
The edit is still processing
Hours changes can take time to appear in Search and Maps. That is why we suggest entering holiday hours well before the date rather than the night before. If you have changed hours several times in a short period, wait for the earlier edit to show before re-editing.
A third-party tool is overwriting or blocking the change
If you use a listing or social management tool to push hours to Google, the tool’s connection needs sufficient access on the profile. When the connection has limited rights, updates sent from the tool may not go through. Check the tool’s connected account and, when in doubt, make the change directly in Google and then confirm it in the tool so the two do not conflict.
Customers or others suggested a different time
Google can show customer-suggested edits, and an incorrect suggestion sometimes sits on the profile. Check your profile in Search and Maps after each change, on both a phone and a desktop, from a signed-out browser window so you see what the public sees.
Special hours and the rest of your profile
Hours are one signal among many. A profile with perfect holiday hours but the wrong primary category or thin service information still struggles to win the map pack. Once your hours are right, work through the rest of the checklist:
- Confirm your categories with a quick pass through our 15 minute audit of Google Business Profile categories.
- Look at the bigger fixes first using a Google Business Profile audit built for home services.
- Lay out a longer plan with our 90 day Google Business Profile plan.
- If you run an HVAC company, see HVAC Google business priorities, including how to treat different profile types.
Our perspective
Most owners treat holiday hours as a once-a-year chore, and that is exactly why they go wrong. In our work with local service businesses, we see the same pattern: the profile is accurate in spring, stale by Thanksgiving, and nobody notices until a customer complains about a call that went nowhere.
We built our approach around local service businesses only, so we think about hours the way a dispatcher does. Who answers the phone on the Friday after Thanksgiving? Is the emergency line really staffed on Christmas Eve? The answer belongs on Google before the day arrives, not after.
That is why we manage the profile hands-on for our clients, without asking them to learn new tools or platforms. Hours, categories, posts, and reviews are handled as one routine, so a holiday calendar does not depend on someone remembering to log in. Accurate hours will not rank you alone, but they protect every call your rankings earn.
John
Get hours, reviews, and rankings handled together
If you would rather not track holiday dates, bulk files, and profile access yourself, our team can take that work off your plate. We handle Google Business Profile management and optimization, review and reputation management, and local search and Google Maps visibility for local service businesses such as HVAC, home services, automotive, health and wellness, and professional firms.
If you are unsure where your profile stands today, start with a personal local SEO audit to see how your visibility looks against competitors in your area. To learn what ongoing management covers, visit Local Growth Direct. If you are still building the profile, our guide on how to set up a Google Business Profile is the place to begin.
Frequently asked questions
How do I change my business hours on Google Search?
Sign in to the account that manages your profile, search for your business name, and choose Edit profile, then Hours. Update your regular weekly schedule there, or select Edit next to “Special hours” for a one-time change. Save, and Google confirms the update on your profile.
How far ahead can I set holiday hours?
Add holiday hours as soon as you know your schedule. Google suggests upcoming dates you can review, and you can also add any date yourself. Setting them two to three weeks ahead leaves room for the change to appear and for you to fix anything before the holiday.
Do I need to add special hours if my holiday hours match my regular hours?
Google recommends confirming hours for official holidays even when they match your normal schedule. That tells customers the information has been checked, which helps avoid a generic notice that hours might differ.
What if I will be closed for more than six days?
Special hours cover closures of up to 6 days in a row. For 7 or more days in a row, or an unknown length, mark the business as Temporarily closed instead, per Google’s guidance. Switch back to open with main hours when you reopen.
Why is Google Maps showing the wrong time for my business?
First check that your regular hours are set to “Open with main hours,” since special hours do not display otherwise. Then confirm you are signed in as a manager, look for pending or customer-suggested edits, and make sure any connected tool is not overwriting your changes.
Sources
- How to set Special hours, Google Business Profile Help
- Edit your business hours, Google Business Profile Help
- How to set business hours or mark a closure, Google Business Profile Help