How to update business hours on Google, and keep them right

To update your business hours on Google, sign in to the Google account that manages your Business Profile, search your business name on Google, select Edit profile, then Hours, and edit the main hours for each day before you select Save. On a phone, open the Google Maps app, tap Business at the bottom right, then Edit profile. Google reviews an edit before it shows on the live profile, so the new hours can take a little while to appear.

That covers the one change you came to make. The rest of this guide covers what tends to go wrong next: holiday hours that overwrite the wrong day, a profile that shows hours you never set, and how to find out that your hours moved before a customer arrives to a locked door.

How to update business hours on Google, step by step

Google’s help page for editing business hours lays out the route like this (as of October 2026):

1. Sign in with the account linked to the profile. Only an owner or manager can edit. If you look after a client’s listing, ask to be added as a manager rather than sharing a password.
2. Open your Business Profile. Search your business name on Google while signed in. The profile appears with its editing controls at the top.
3. Select Edit profile, then Hours.
4. Next to Hours, select Edit, then Open with main hours. This is the normal weekly schedule.
5. Tick each day you are open and set the times with the dropdowns.
6. Select Save.

On the Google Maps app the route is the same once you reach Edit profile: tap Business, then Edit profile, then the hours.

A few shapes of week need one extra move:

Google’s page also notes that after you change your hours, the profile can show a short message confirming the update, and a matching post appears on the Updates tab on mobile. You can edit that post to explain the change, or delete it to remove the message.

How to set holiday and special hours

Special hours are for a short break from the normal week: a public holiday, an event, a stocktake. Google’s special hours page says you can use them when the business temporarily adjusts its hours or stays closed for up to 6 days in a row. Longer than that is a change to your main hours or a temporary closure.

To set them:

1. Go to your Business Profile and select Edit profile, then Hours.
2. Next to Special hours, select Edit.
3. Pick a date. Google often suggests upcoming holidays; select Review to confirm one, or Add a date for your own.
4. Untick Closed and enter the hours if you are open, or leave Closed ticked if you are not.
5. Select Save.

Google recommends confirming your hours for official holidays even when they are the same as usual. A confirmed holiday tells customers the hours were checked, and it saves Google from guessing on your behalf.

One trap catches late-night businesses. A set of special hours cannot run past 24 hours, so a shift from 7 PM to 5 PM the next day has to be split into two sets: one until midnight and one from midnight. When special hours cover a day, Google ignores your regular hours for it, so re-enter any of that day’s normal hours you still want shown.

Updating hours for several locations at once

If you manage many locations, the bulk spreadsheet in Business Profile has a Special hours column. Google’s help page gives the date format as YYYY-MM-DD: HH:MM-HH:MM, with an x for a day you are closed all day.

Be careful with empty columns. Google warns that if you upload a sheet with a column heading but nothing under it, the existing information in that column is erased. For an hours-only update, upload just the store code and the hours columns.

Why Google shows hours you did not set

This is usually why people go looking for this guide a second time. You set the hours, they were right, and now the profile says something else.

Google’s page on updates to your Business Profile says Google gathers information from several sources, including reports from users and licensed content, and may update a profile when those sources say its details are out of date. As of October 2026, the same page describes how it works for edits suggested by the public:

If a suggested edit requires your review, you may receive an email or an in-product notification. Once notified, you have 4 days to accept or reject the suggestion.

If you do not answer within those 4 days, Google may publish the change when other public information supports it, such as your own website. The page also says plainly that Google may apply some suggested edits without prior review. So a notice is not guaranteed.

Hours can change through a third route too. Google sometimes sends an automated call, text or WhatsApp message to the phone number on the profile to confirm details such as opening hours. Google’s help page says answers given that way are added to the profile, shown as pending, and reviewed for up to 5 business days. If a staff member answers that message with the wrong hours, the wrong hours can end up on the listing.

How to spot hours Google changed

Google gives you three places to look, all inside the profile editor:

• Blue text. In the editor, information Google changed shows in blue. Black or white text has no Google update on it.
• A notification at the top. When there are Google updates waiting, a notice appears above the profile.
• Collected info. Under Edit profile, Collected info lists details Google gathered through those automated messages, with where each came from and the date. You can delete an entry there, though Google notes that doing so does not change details already on the profile.

To put your own hours back, edit them as in the first section and save. A direct edit from the owner is the fix Google itself points to.

The catch is that every one of these checks needs you to open the editor and look. Nothing reaches you unless Google decides to notify you, and some changes skip that step entirely. The usual way people find out their Saturday hours vanished is a customer telling them.

How to get told the day your hours change

You have three honest options, depending on how many listings you look after.

Listing Guard is the third row. You search for the business by name and city and pick its Google listing, with no Google sign-in needed. The first check records the listing’s name, categories, address, phone number, website and opening hours. Every 24 hours after that it checks again, and if anything changed it sends one email listing each field before and after. For hours it names only the days that moved, so “Saturday: 9 AM to 5 PM became Closed” is the whole message.

Two details matter for hours in particular:

• Formatting is not a change. A reordered category list or a reformatted phone number does not trigger an alert, and a value it could not confirm on a given day is never reported as a change.
• A failed check says so. If a day’s check cannot read the listing, the dashboard shows that and retries within hours, so a quiet dashboard means the listing was read and nothing moved.

It is also clear about its limits. It cannot stop Google applying an edit and it cannot tell who made one, whether Google, the public or someone with access to the profile. You fix the hours in Business Profile as usual. A new account gets 100 credits once, enough to watch 5 listings for their first month, with no card required.

When the manual way is enough

Plenty of businesses do not need an alert:

• One location with steady hours and an owner who opens the profile editor every week or two. The blue text and the notification banner will show most Google updates.
• A business that already answers Google’s suggested-edit emails promptly and rarely gets public suggestions.
• A listing you are about to change anyway, for example ahead of a seasonal switch, when you will be in the editor regardless.

An alert earns its place when a wrong hour costs you that day: a restaurant, a clinic, a trade that gets weekend calls, or an agency answering for a dozen client profiles where nobody opens each editor weekly. The local SEO audit checklist is a good place to fold the weekly look into a routine, and if a listing has gone missing from Maps altogether, why is my business not showing on Google Maps covers that case.

Quick checklist for correct hours on Google

• Main hours set for every day, with split shifts entered as two blocks.
• Special hours entered for each public holiday, even the ordinary ones.
• More hours added for delivery, takeout or services with their own schedule.
• No blue text or pending update in the editor that you did not expect.
• Staff know that a call or text from Google about hours should be answered by whoever sets them.
• Someone, or something, re-reads the live hours on a schedule.

Get those right and the hours on Google match the hours on your door, which is the whole point of having them there.

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