Once your business calendar is switched on, response targets stop counting the hours you are closed. Weekly opening hours handle the ordinary week. Holidays handle the exceptions, and typing them in one at a time is tedious enough that people put it off and the calendar quietly goes stale.
That is what the holiday presets are for. There are three, and the useful thing to know is exactly what is in each one, because none of them is a complete national list and one of them has a gap you will notice.
The three presets
US federal is the fullest, with eleven dates: New Year's Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.
UK bank holidays has six: New Year's Day, the early May bank holiday, the spring bank holiday, the summer bank holiday, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
EU bank holidays has four: New Year's Day, Labour Day on 1 May, Christmas Day and St. Stephen's Day on 26 December. It is deliberately a conservative pan-European subset — dates that are holidays in most member states rather than any one country's full list. If you operate in a single European country, treat this as a starting point and add your national days by hand.
The UK preset leaves out Easter
This is the one to plan around. Good Friday and Easter Monday are not in the UK preset. They are missing on purpose: Easter is not a fixed date, it moves by a calculation that varies between traditions, and rather than get it subtly wrong the preset omits it and leaves it to you.
So a UK team that clicks the preset and considers the year done has two working days marked as ordinary that are not. In practice that shows up as response targets counting against you over the Easter weekend. Add both dates manually after applying the UK preset, every year, and put it on the same note as the preset itself so the two are never separated.
Presets apply one year at a time
A preset is applied to a specific year that you choose. It does not roll forward, and it does not populate a decade in advance. Next January somebody has to apply it again for the new year.
The dates themselves are worked out fresh for whichever year you pick, which is why the same preset keeps working year after year without anyone maintaining a table of dates. Fixed dates like Christmas are simply that date in that year. Moving ones are resolved by rule — the third Monday in January, the last Monday in May, the fourth Thursday in November — so Thanksgiving lands correctly in any year you apply it to.
The most practical habit is to apply next year's preset in the same sitting as this year's. It takes a few seconds, and it removes the failure mode where the calendar silently stops covering you in January.
Re-running is safe, and your own labels win
Applying a preset twice does nothing the second time. Each date is added only if that date is not already on your calendar, and the result tells you how many were actually added — so a second run reports zero rather than duplicating eleven dates. If you are unsure whether somebody already did it, just do it; there is no harm.
The check is on the date, not the name. That has a consequence worth knowing: if you have already marked 25 December with your own label — Company closed, or Christmas shutdown — the preset will not overwrite it, and your wording stays. The date is closed either way, which is what actually affects your response targets, so this is the right behaviour. It just means the labels on your calendar can be a mix of yours and the preset's, and that is fine.
When your team spans two regions
Nothing stops you applying more than one preset to the same year, and because each date is added only if it is not already there, the overlaps take care of themselves. Apply the US and UK presets together and New Year's Day is added once, not twice. Christmas Day likewise.
Whether you should is a different question, and it depends on what your calendar represents. The calendar describes when your support operation is closed, not the union of every holiday your customers observe. A team sitting in London that closes on UK bank holidays should apply the UK preset alone, even if half its customers are American — adding US federal holidays would mark the team closed on days it is open, and quietly flatter every response-time number for those days.
The case for applying two presets is when you genuinely have people in both places and the whole operation stands down on both sets of days. If instead you have coverage in each region on the other's holidays, the calendar is the wrong tool for expressing that, and the honest approach is to mark only the days when nobody at all is working.
Checking it landed
The confirmation tells you how many holidays were added, and that number is worth reading rather than dismissing. A count lower than you expected is not a failure — it usually means some of those dates were already on the calendar, which is exactly what you want. A count of zero on a year you have never touched is the one that deserves a second look.
Either way, read the resulting list back. It is a short list, it is the thing your response targets are measured against for the next twelve months, and it is much cheaper to check now than to explain later.
What a holiday actually means here
A holiday is a whole closed day. It is not a shortened day, and there is no half-day option: a date is either a holiday or it is governed by your normal opening hours for that weekday. If you close at lunchtime on Christmas Eve, the honest options are to mark the whole day closed or to leave it as a normal day, and most teams find marking it closed is closer to the truth than pretending it is ordinary.
Holidays are also not only public holidays. The calendar does not care why you are shut, so the days worth adding by hand include your company offsite, an all-hands afternoon, a local or regional day the preset cannot know about, and the quiet stretch between Christmas and New Year if you genuinely close it. Those hand-added days are exactly the ones a preset can never supply.
A ten-minute routine
- Apply the preset closest to where your team sits, for this year and next.
- If you used the UK preset, add Good Friday and Easter Monday for both years, now, while you are thinking about it.
- Add the days that are yours alone — offsites, local holidays, the end-of-year shutdown.
- Read the resulting list back and check it against a calendar you trust. The preset is a shortcut, not an authority.
- Put a reminder in November to apply next year's preset and re-add Easter.
Holidays only change your reported numbers once the calendar itself is switched on, which is a separate step covered in setting business hours and holidays. You will find the calendar with the rest of the configuration screens in your dashboard.