If your organization has offices worldwide, it’s important to reflect public holidays and non-working days for each country.
Otherwise, scheduling, availability, and capacity tracking may be inaccurate—like overbooking someone on a national holiday or miscounting time off.
This guide shows you how to set up holiday calendars for international teams so that time off is automatically accounted for and your plans stay reliable.
Adding a New Holiday Calendar
Step 1: Create a Subsidiary
When creating a new subsidiary, Productive will ask you to assign it to a country.
Step 2: Add a Holiday Calendar for the Subsidiary
After creating your subsidiary, navigate to Settings > Holidays to add a holiday calendar for that country/subsidiary. Click the New Holiday Calendar button.
A pop-up window will prompt you to enter:
Calendar name
Country (from the dropdown menu)
State (optional; necessary for region-specific holidays)
📌 Tip: For countries with state-specific holidays (e.g., the United States or Australia), selecting the state ensures your calendar includes those regional holidays. If no state is selected, only nationwide holidays will be included.
Automatic Holiday Generation
When creating or editing a holiday calendar, you can toggle automatic holiday generation:
On: Holidays are automatically added and updated based on the selected country (and state, if applicable).
If you manually delete an autogenerated holiday, it won’t return unless you recreate the calendar from scratch.Off: The calendar remains empty for you to manually add holidays.
Off for Existing Calendar: Existing holidays remain, but no new ones will be added automatically.
Choose the option that fits your needs: automatic updates for convenience, or manual control for customization.
Step 3: Assign Subsidiaries and Holiday Calendars to Employees
When creating a new user profile, assign them to a subsidiary and the corresponding holiday calendar in their cost rates settings. This ensures their availability and capacity reflect local holidays automatically.
Reassigning a Holiday Calendar
Sometimes an existing employee’s holiday calendar needs updating. For example, if they relocate internationally but remain employed by a different branch.
To update an employee’s holiday calendar:
Go to Resourcing > Employees or Settings > Users, and open the employee’s profile.
Under Cost rates, click + Cost rate or edit an existing one.
In the popup, use the Holiday calendar dropdown to select or add a new calendar.
📌 Note: If no holiday calendar is assigned, the account’s default calendar applies.
Only account admins can assign or change holiday calendars.
📌 You can also create a new one directly from the dropdown by selecting + Add Holiday List.
How Holiday Calendars Work Across Productive
Once holiday calendars are assigned to your team, they automatically adjust availability, scheduling, and time off in key parts of the platform:
In the Resource Planner, holidays are flagged on the schedule. If you create a booking over a holiday, the time won’t count—it’s treated as a non-working day.
In the My Time section, holidays are visibly marked. People aren’t expected to track time on those days, though manual time entry is still possible (just like weekends).
When booking absence, holidays are excluded from the allowance. Dragging over a bank holiday won’t deduct from someone’s paid leave.
In the Workload Layout, national holidays reduce the person’s daily capacity to zero. This helps you plan tasks around real availability.
If you assign different calendars per region, each person’s availability automatically adjusts based on their location. This setup ensures that time tracking, planning, and absence policies reflect realistic, region-specific working hours.
Show All Holidays Toggle
To manage visibility, use the ⚙️ icon in the Resource Planner to choose whether you want to show holidays from all calendars or just the ones relevant to the current user.
