How do I set holiday and after-hours times on Google?
Short answer
Use the special hours setting in your Google Business Profile for holidays and any other date your schedule differs, and leave your regular hours as they are. For after-hours service, list only the times a customer can reach a person and book a job. Listing hours when nobody answers misleads customers and breaks Google's rules.
Holiday times go in the special hours setting of your Google Business Profile, which changes the hours for chosen dates and leaves your regular hours untouched. After-hours service is a different matter. The setting is the easy part, and the harder part is what you can truthfully say about when someone answers the phone.
The kinds of hours on a profile
| Setting | What it is for | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Regular hours | Your normal week | The days and times your office answers calls |
| Special hours | Named dates when the schedule differs | Closed on Thanksgiving, a short day on Christmas Eve |
| Additional hour types | A separate schedule for one part of the business | Offered for some categories only |
The additional hour types vary by category and Google changes them. Look in your own profile editor to see whether one fits before you plan around it.
Setting hours for a holiday
Open the profile editor (signed in as an owner or manager, search for your business name on Google or open it in the Maps app), go to the hours section and add the date under special hours. Mark the day closed or enter the hours you’ll keep. Google moves these menus around, so if what you see differs, follow Google’s current help page and don’t trust a screenshot from an old article.
Do it ahead of time. Google commonly asks owners to confirm their hours before public holidays, and a listing whose holiday hours are unconfirmed may carry a notice that the hours might differ. Confirm even if you’re open as usual, since that replaces the doubt with a plain statement.
Special hours are for more than public holidays. A company training day or a week when the office closes early belongs there too.
After-hours and emergency service
List the hours when a customer can reach a person and get a job booked. If a hypothetical plumbing company in El Cajon has a dispatcher or an on-call technician answering through the night, showing those hours as open is accurate. If night calls go to voicemail until morning, it isn’t.
Listing yourself as open around the clock to look available when you aren’t is a misrepresentation, and Google’s rules require business information to be accurate. It also fails in practice. A homeowner with a burst pipe who reaches a recording calls the next company, and some of them leave a review about it. Members of the public can suggest corrected hours as well.
An answering service that only takes a message is a judgment call. I’d keep the listed hours to the times a job can be booked, and state the real after-hours arrangement in the profile description and on the website.
Whether hours affect how often you appear
To a degree, yes. Google has indicated that whether a business is open at the time of a search is one of the things its local results take into account, and it’s commonly observed that a business shown as closed appears less often for searches made at that hour. Google doesn’t publish how much weight this carries.
That’s no reason to invent hours. It’s a reason to keep real ones accurate, and to make sure calls are answered during them, which leads to whether it matters how fast you answer calls from Google.
Keep the same hours everywhere
Your website and your other listings should show the same hours as the profile. When they disagree, Google may replace your hours with what it finds elsewhere, which is one answer to why Google changed the information on your profile. After a holiday, look at the listing once to confirm that the regular hours are showing again. Hours are one of the fields I compare across sources in a profile audit.