Holiday Hours on Google Business Profile (and Everywhere)

Setting holiday hours on Google Business Profile means going into Edit profile, then Hours, then Special hours, choosing the date, and entering your open and close times (or marking the day closed) before saving, and then repeating a version of that same update on every other platform your business is listed on. Most owners only update Google and assume it covers them everywhere, which is exactly how a local SEO citation builder ends up staring at five different closing times for the same business on the same day. The fix is not to remember every platform manually every time; it is to treat hours as part of your NAP and update the small set of places that actually carry your listing on a fixed schedule.

This guide covers the current steps for Google, then Apple, Bing, Facebook and Yelp, when to publish the change, how seasonal businesses should think about this differently from a one-day holiday, and a quick reference table for the whole list.

Setting holiday hours on Google Business Profile (special hours)

Google calls holiday hours “special hours,” a distinct field from your regular weekly hours. The current path, per Google’s own help documentation:

1. Go to your Business Profile.
2. Select Edit profile, then Hours.
3. In the Business hours section, next to Special hours, select Edit.
4. Select the date, either from Google’s suggested upcoming dates or by adding a custom one.
5. If you are closed for the day, make sure the Closed box is checked. If you are open with different hours, uncheck it and enter your open and close times.
6. Select Save.

You can set special hours for up to six consecutive days at a time; for a closure running longer than that, Google’s guidance is to mark the business “Temporarily closed” instead of stacking special-hours entries. Google specifically recommends confirming your hours for official holidays, even when they are the same as your regular hours, since an unconfirmed date reads as stale to anyone checking. Saved special hours appear under the Hours tab and only display to customers on the dates you set, not permanently.

Google’s general guidance is that profile changes usually take about 10 minutes to review, but sometimes up to 30 days, so there is no hard countdown, but there is also no reason to wait. Set the date the moment you know it. Google can also apply a change to your listing on its own through a suggested edit from another user, which is worth knowing if your hours ever look different from what you last saved.

Apple Business Connect

Apple’s business tool separates hours into three types, and the distinction matters:

• Normal hours: your standard weekly schedule, which Apple’s own guidance notes should match what is published on your official website.
• Special hours (labeled “service” in Apple’s guide): hours that apply only to a specific service you offer at that location, not the whole business.
• Temporary hours: the field for a single day or a run of days, including what Apple’s guide calls “Holiday open hours” and “Holiday closed hours,” which is the one you want for a holiday closure or altered schedule.

Set these inside your Apple Business Connect location’s hours configuration; Apple’s guide does not publish a fixed minimum lead time, so the same rule applies: set it as soon as you know the date. See Apple’s location attribute guide for the current interface.

Bing, Facebook and Yelp

Bing, Facebook and Yelp each maintain a hours field inside their own business dashboard, separate from Google and Apple, with no automatic sync between platforms. In practice this means:

• Bing Places carries its own hours field inside your listing dashboard. Bing has changed this tool’s structure before, so confirm the current steps inside your own dashboard rather than relying on an old bookmark, and set special hours the same way you would a regular hours edit.
• Facebook Pages let you add hours and mark temporary changes (including holiday closures) from your Page’s editing settings, under the hours section.
• Yelp for Business lets owners set both regular hours and a temporary or holiday-hours override from the business owner dashboard.

Because none of these platforms watch each other, an accurate Google listing with a stale Yelp listing still sends some customers to the wrong information. See fix NAP inconsistency for why one accurate platform never fully offsets several inaccurate ones. If your pin position needs a fix at the same time as your hours, fixing a map pin in the wrong location walks through the same platform-by-platform pattern.

When to publish holiday hours

There is no single countdown that applies to every platform, but the practical pattern is the same everywhere:

• Set it as soon as the date and hours are final. Most platforms show the change quickly, but a couple can take longer or sit in a review queue, so early beats last-minute.
• Confirm it again close to the date. A quick check the week before catches anything that failed to save or reverted.
• Remove or let it expire after the date passes. Special hours on Google, and the equivalent temporary-hours fields elsewhere, are date-bound and should not need manual removal, but confirm your regular hours are still correct once the holiday period ends.

Platform quick reference

Platform	Where to set it	Lead time
Google Business Profile	Edit profile > Hours > Special hours > Edit	As soon as known; typically about 10 minutes, sometimes up to 30 days
Apple Business Connect	Location hours, Temporary hours (Holiday open/closed)	As soon as known; no published minimum
Bing Places	Listing dashboard, hours section	As soon as known; check current dashboard steps directly
Facebook Page	Page settings, hours section, temporary/holiday hours	As soon as known
Yelp for Business	Business owner dashboard, hours, temporary/holiday override	As soon as known

Seasonal businesses need more than a single holiday entry

A one-day holiday closure is a special-hours entry. A seasonal business is a different problem: the entire regular-hours block changes for weeks or months, and it needs to change on every platform, not just be layered with a temporary exception.

This shows up constantly in our own client builds. Tourism businesses, boat tours, yacht charters, car rental counters and travel agencies on seasonal routes are some of the most common local SEO for tourism businesses clients we build citations for, and seasonal hours are consistently one of their two most common NAP problems, alongside multilingual business names that get transliterated differently across directories. A boat tour that runs April through October needs its full hours block updated for the season, not just a holiday flag for a single closed day, and it needs that update repeated across every directory that lists it, since a customer checking a secondary directory in the off-season has no way to know the primary Google listing was updated correctly.

If your business has a defined season, build a recurring calendar reminder for the start and end of each season, and treat it the same way you would treat updating a phone number across listings: one master schedule, applied everywhere your business appears, not just on the platform you check most often.

Why wrong hours cost more than a bad review

A customer who drives to a location that is closed when Google said it would be open does not usually leave a review explaining the discrepancy; they just do not come back, and they do not check whether the mistake was Google’s data or yours. Inconsistent hours across your citations is a NAP consistency problem the same way a wrong phone number is: it erodes the trust signal search engines use to decide how confidently to rank and display your listing, on top of the direct cost of a lost customer. Our free NAP checker flags basic mismatches across major sources in about a minute if you want a fast gut check before a holiday weekend.

If keeping hours, address and phone aligned across every directory is more than you want to track by hand each season, a citation building service that verifies live listings against one master record does that monitoring for you, on top of building new citations.

A simple holiday hours checklist

Use this before any major holiday or planned closure:

• Confirm the exact closed or adjusted hours internally before touching any listing, so every platform gets the same number.
• Update Google Business Profile special hours first; it is usually your highest-traffic listing.
• Update Apple Business Connect temporary hours.
• Update Bing Places, Facebook and Yelp hours from their own dashboards.
• Check any industry-specific directories your business relies on, since a booking or reservation platform showing the wrong hours can cost a sale directly.
• Recheck all of them the week of the holiday, since a save that silently failed is easy to miss until it is too late to fix.
• Once the holiday passes, confirm your regular hours are still showing correctly everywhere.

The takeaway

Holiday hours are a small, dated field, but they only work if every platform that lists your business carries the same correct version at the same time. Set special hours on Google the moment you know the date, repeat the update on Apple, Bing, Facebook and Yelp, and if your business runs on a season rather than a single closed day, treat the whole schedule as part of your core NAP rather than an afterthought. See the NAP consistency hub for the broader discipline this fits into, and what is NAP if you are building this process for the first time.