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UK Bank Holidays Missing From Your iPhone Calendar? Here's What to Do

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If you live in the United Kingdom, there's a good chance you enjoyed yesterday's first official bank holiday of the year with your feet up. But if all you'd done was rely on the Calendar app on your iPhone, you may never have even known you were due a day off. That's because a persistent bug that has plagued the app for months still prevents Apple's UK bank holidays subscription option from populating the calendar view for 2022.

uk-calendar.jpg

Based on the number of complaints online, many iPhone users in the UK have been aware of this issue for some time, but with 2022 now upon us, that number has risen exponentially. Apple surely knows there's a problem with its UK Holidays subscription webcal, but until it does something about it, here's an alternative way to get the full list of dates for England and Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland booked into your calendar in a few quick steps.
  • Monday, January 3 - New Year's Day
  • Friday, April 15 - Good Friday
  • Monday, April 18 - Easter Monday
  • Monday, May 2 - May Day
  • Thursday, June 2 - Spring bank holiday
  • Friday, June 3 - Platinum Jubilee bank holiday
  • Monday, August 29 - Summer bank holiday
  • Monday, December 26 - Boxing Day
  • Tuesday, December 27 - Christmas Day (substitute)
The above public holidays list is the official one for England and Wales for 2022 provided by the UK government, which helpfully provides Apple users with its own ICS calendar files that can be imported into the iPhone calendar app. Follow the steps to import the one that applies to your country into your calendar now.
  1. Tap the England and Wales link on your iPhone or iPad. (Scotland holidays link, Northern Ireland holidays link.) Alternately, paste it into Safari's address bar and hit Enter. If you're asked to open the page in Calendar, tap Open.
  2. Tap Subscribe. You can give the calendar subscription a recognizable name (and color if you want), then add it to your iCloud or iPhone account.
  3. Tap Add.
how-to-add-uk-bank-holidays-calendar.jpg

After that, the months in your chosen calendar should now be populated with all the bank holidays you're already looking forward to in the year ahead.

Update: As noted by MacRumors readers, this is also an issue in Spain, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and several other countries. Given that it might be a worldwide issue, Apple could have a fix coming in a future update.

Article Link: UK Bank Holidays Missing From Your iPhone Calendar? Here's What to Do
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/uk-bank-holidays-missing-iphone-calendar/
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Thanks for that, I did double check yesterday just to make sure I was meant to be off (Been off since before christmas so lost track of time!).

Also I forgot about the long weekend in June - thanks Queen Betty II
 
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In Ireland we have this "Christmas Dad (observed)" and "New Year's Day (observed)" two days after each day, but we don't use any such term in the country. Sounds like an American thing.

I will not fix humorous typos. C ya, Dad ??
 
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You can't subscribe to the calendar by clicking on the link, you can only import them to an existing or create a new calendar. Or you can copy the ics link, create a new subscription calendar then paste the ics link in.
 
Mac Fly (film) said:
In Ireland we have this "Christmas Dad (observed)" and "New Year's Day (observed)" two days after each day, but we don't use any such term in the country. Sounds like an American thing.
Click to expand...
Looks correct to me-

Christmas Day (observed) - Dec 27th 2021
St Stephens Day (observed) - Dec 28th 2021
New Year’s Day (observed) - Jan 3rd 2022

Christmas Day (observed) - Dec 27th 2022
St Stephens Day - Dec 26th 2022
New Year’s Day (observed) - Jan 2nd 2023

Irish people just don’t know the correct term for observances of public holidays. Just like they mostly don’t know the term ‘Daylight Savings’. They just refer to it as ‘When the clocks change’
 
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Do remember that Scotland and Northern Ireland are different.

For Scotland: https://www.mygov.scot/scotland-bank-holidays


2022 Likely dates , but could still change.
3 JanuaryMondayNew Year's Day (substitute day)
4 JanuaryTuesday2 January (substitute day)
15 AprilFridayGood Friday
2 MayMondayEarly May bank holiday
2 JuneThursdaySpring bank holiday
3 JuneFridayPlatinum Jubilee bank holiday
1 AugustMondaySummer bank holiday
30 NovemberWednesdaySt Andrew's Day
26 DecemberMondayBoxing Day
27 DecemberTuesdayChristmas Day (substitute day)
 
markhort said:
You can't subscribe to the calendar by clicking on the link, you can only import them to an existing or create a new calendar. Or you can copy the ics link, create a new subscription calendar then paste the ics link in.
Click to expand...
Depends what you do with the link. Either way should get the dates in your calendar.
 
JosephAW said:
Have the opposite problem, how do I delete items from US Holidays off my calendar?
Click to expand...
The holiday calendars are automatically added based on your region setting in Settings, not all countries holidays are added by Apple. So if you are in the UK you can change your region to UK and it should subscribe and add the UK ones, but currently they aren’t working. If you are US based then I don’t believe you can remove them just untick the calendar so it doesn’t display.
 
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fivenotrump said:
There is no 'bug in the app': there is a source file that Apple hasn't updated. There may be a bug in an Apple internal app that creates this file; alternatively there may be a bug within management.
Click to expand...
Yeah if you look inside the ICS file no entries for 2022, so not been updated. Pretty sure they had this same issues a few years back. Must not have set a reminder to update it!
 
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Is there a link to other countries holidays? Same problem here, in Portugal. No holidays showing for 2022…
 
fivenotrump said:
There is no 'bug in the app': there is a source file that Apple hasn't updated. There may be a bug in an Apple internal app that creates this file; alternatively there may be a bug within management.
Click to expand...
Are you sure this is it? My girlfriend has the built-in UK Holidays calendar and she has holidays for 2022 showing up fine. (I don’t though)
 
timmyh said:
Depends what you do with the link. Either way should get the dates in your calendar.
Click to expand...
Just saying that, in the write up it says open the link from Safari. But if you just tap and open the link from Safari it doesn't give you the option to subscribe, only to import the contents from the ics file. You have to do a little bit more if you want to subscribe.
 
I can see how this happens. Stuff like this needs a whole team of people, proper management and centralisation really as it's a massive task to maintain geographic specific databases.

Probably comparable to: https://www.iana.org/time-zones

I think in this circumstance though, each regional government probably should issue a standard "interface" much like UK government does with their ICS feed and Apple should point the default UK holiday calendar at that.
 
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What is even more frustrating is that Apple’s “U.K. Holidays” calendar (which cannot be deleted) includes bank holidays for the whole of the U.K.

If you are based in England say, you will have entries which apply only to other countries within the U.K. and which cannot be deleted.

Would it be so difficult for apple to provide separate calendars for each country?! At least let me delete the U.K. one!
 
The NI and Scotland links in the article are https:// instead of webcal:// so if you're wanting to open it directly in the Calendar app so it creates a subscription you'll want to change https to webcal.
 
Same thing in Sweden, according to Apple we won’t have any holidays this year. Darn.
 
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