What Holidays Did Google Remove From Google Calendar?

Google Calendar has long been a go-to tool for keeping track of public holidays, cultural observances, and national celebrations across dozens of countries. But over the years, users have noticed that certain holidays have quietly disappeared — or never appeared at all — prompting genuine confusion about what changed and why.

Here's what's actually happening, and what it means for how you use the calendar.

The Short Answer: Google Periodically Audits Its Holiday Calendars

Google doesn't maintain a single static list of holidays forever. The holiday data in Google Calendar is managed through regional "calendar of interest" subscriptions — the ones you overlay onto your personal calendar by selecting a country or region under "Other calendars."

Google updates these lists based on:

• Changes in government-recognized public holidays
• Feedback about inaccurate or culturally inappropriate inclusions
• Policy decisions about how Google categorizes observances vs. official holidays
• Data source updates from regional authorities

When any of these change, holidays can be added, renamed, moved, or removed without a formal announcement.

Specific Holidays Users Have Reported Missing 📅

While Google doesn't publish a changelog for holiday calendar updates, user communities and tech forums have tracked several notable removals and omissions over the years:

In the United States:

• Columbus Day has been relabeled or removed in some regional views, reflecting broader cultural shifts. Some users see it; others see Indigenous Peoples' Day in its place, depending on their account region settings.
• Washington's Birthday (the official federal name) often shows as Presidents' Day — and in some views has been absent entirely from certain account types.

In the United Kingdom:

• Some users on older account configurations reported bank holidays in Scotland and Northern Ireland not appearing in the standard UK holiday overlay, as Google historically defaulted to England/Wales public holiday schedules.

Globally:

• Several religious observances that were previously included as default calendar entries — including certain Islamic, Hindu, and Jewish holidays — were reclassified. In some regions, they moved from the main holiday calendar to separate "Religious Holidays" sub-calendars that must be subscribed to independently.
• Regional independence days and local observances in smaller nations have been added and removed as Google's data sources changed.

Why Does This Matter More Than It Seems?

The practical consequence is significant for anyone who relies on Google Calendar for scheduling around public holidays — especially in cross-timezone or international team settings.

If a holiday has been removed from the overlay you subscribed to, Google Calendar won't warn you. Your calendar simply won't show it. You might book a meeting on a national holiday in another country without realizing the calendar is no longer flagging it.

What Determines Whether a Holiday Shows Up for You

The holiday display in Google Calendar isn't one-size-fits-all. Several variables affect what you see:

This means two users in the same country can see genuinely different holiday sets depending on how their accounts are configured and what they've manually subscribed to.

How to Check What Holiday Calendars You're Actually Subscribed To

If you're noticing gaps, the first step is auditing your subscriptions:

1. Open Google Calendar on the web (calendar.google.com)
2. Look at the left sidebar under "Other calendars"
3. Check whether your regional holidays calendar is toggled on
4. Click the three-dot menu next to any holiday calendar to see its settings or unsubscribe/resubscribe to refresh it

Resubscribing to a regional holiday calendar often pulls in the latest data, which can restore holidays that appeared missing due to a stale cache.

The Religious Holidays Split 🕍

One of the more significant structural changes Google made was separating religious and cultural observances from standard public holiday calendars. Where some holidays used to appear automatically, users now need to explicitly subscribe to:

• Jewish Holidays
• Islamic Holidays
• Hindu Holidays
• Christian Holidays (in some regions)

These are available as separate overlays in the "Browse calendars of interest" section. If you previously saw these events and they're now gone, this separation is the most likely explanation.

The Spectrum of Impact

How disruptive this is depends heavily on your workflow:

• Casual personal users who just want to see major national holidays may not notice anything missing
• Remote teams working across countries may find that missing holidays create real scheduling conflicts
• HR and operations professionals who use Google Calendar as a reference for payroll or compliance purposes need to treat it as a starting point, not a definitive source
• Developers using the Google Calendar API to surface holiday data in apps need to account for the fact that holiday calendar contents can change between API calls over time

What's Actually Missing vs. What Was Never There

It's worth distinguishing between two different situations users conflate:

Removed holidays — Events that were previously in a subscribed calendar and no longer appear. This is usually a Google data update.

Never-included holidays — Observances that were never part of Google's holiday data for a given region. Google's coverage has always been uneven for smaller nations, regional holidays, and unofficial observances.

Both feel the same to the user — a blank space on the calendar — but they have different causes and different fixes.

Your specific situation depends on which country's calendar you're using, what type of Google account you have, and what you've actually subscribed to. Those details change what's missing for you versus what was never available in the first place.