Setting up holidays in Productive helps ensure team availability is calculated accurately.

Holidays, like national or bank holidays, are treated as non-working days in Productive. They're visible in the Resource Planner, when booking absences and when tracking time, and they reduce total available capacity across your team.

Properly assigned holiday calendars help you:

Prevent overbooking
Forecast availability more accurately
Support regional and international teams

This guide explains how to manage holiday calendars, assign them to teammates, and adjust settings as your team evolves.

How Holidays Behave Across Productive

Assigned holiday calendars automatically adjust an employee’s capacity by behaving as non-working days.

For example, if someone works 8 hours per day and there are 2 national holidays in a month, their capacity drops by 16 hours. This ensures your team’s availability is calculated accurately.

👉 Find out how capacity and availability work in Capacity and Availability: Everything You Need to Know.

In practice:

In the Resource Planner, holidays are clearly marked. If you create a booking over a holiday, the hours won’t be counted—it’s treated as a non-working day.

Holidays are clearly marked in My Time and people are not expected to track time on those days, but time can still be tracked manually if needed (just like weekends).
When booking absence, holidays are excluded from the allowance—dragging over a bank holiday doesn’t deduct from a person’s paid leave, just like the weekends.
In the task-based Workload Layout, where the user's capacity is shown as zero on national holidays.
If you’re assigning different calendars per region, capacity adjusts automatically to match local holidays.

This setup ensures that forecasts, time tracking, and time off policies all reflect realistic, region-specific working hours.

Accessing Holiday Settings

Navigate to: Settings > Holidays. Only account admins have access to holiday settings.

📌 Quick tip: Type “Holidays” into the Settings search bar to find it faster.

Predefined Calendars

When you create your Productive account, a default holiday calendar is added based on your selected locale.

For example, if your account is based in Australia, Productive automatically includes a calendar with Australian public holidays.

You can review this list, modify it, or add new calendars—for example, for teammates in other countries or remote workers.

Adding a New Holiday Calendar

1) Go to Settings > Holidays

2) Click New Holiday Calendar in the upper right

3) In the pop-up, define:

Calendar name
Country (from the dropdown)
State (optional, but necessary for region-specific holidays)

📌 State-specific holidays won't appear unless you select a state. If none is selected, only nationwide holidays are included.

👉 For more details on setting holidays for different subsidiaries, check Configuring Holiday Calendars for International Teams article.

“Generate Holidays Automatically” Toggle

Enable this to let Productive:

Pre-fill the calendar with holidays based on your selection
Auto-update it with future holidays

📌 If you delete an autogenerated holiday (e.g., Christmas), it won’t reappear—now or in future years—unless you recreate the holiday calendar.

If you disable the toggle:

No new holidays will be added automatically
Existing holidays stay as they are
You’ll need to manage dates manually

Editing a Holiday Calendar

To edit a calendar:

Hover over an existing holiday and click its name to edit
Scroll to the bottom of the calendar to + Add Holiday manually

📌 Be sure to check if autogeneration is on or off before editing, so your changes aren’t overridden by the system or ignored if autogeneration is disabled.