UK Bank Holidays Missing From Your iPhone Calendar? Here's What to Do
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Tap Add.
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.