Set Up Your Family Calendar
One calendar per person, shared both ways, so nobody in your house has to be the only one who knows what’s happening today.
Checked against Google’s own Calendar help, September 2026
Tell this page who’s in your family and which calendars you want, and it builds your setup plan with everyone’s names already in it: who shares with whom, which setting to pick, and what to do on each phone. It all runs on free Google Calendar, which works on iPhones, Android phones, and computers.
Your plan and checkmarks save in this browser, and the names never leave it.
Why one calendar per person?
Google makes a single calendar called “Family” when you set up a family group, and most people stop there. One bucket for everyone means nothing is color coded by person, you can’t hide one person’s stuff, and events don’t belong to anyone.
Give everyone their own calendar and share it both ways, and you get all of that for free. Each person shows up in their own color, and you can flip to just your appointments or just the kids’ with one tap.
The best part: it’s their calendar shared with you, not your calendar for them. So when your kid signs into a new phone, everything follows, because the calendar belongs to their account. Nothing to rebuild.
Build your plan
Who’s in your family?
Add everyone who’ll use the calendar. Each person gets their own color.
Which extra calendars do you want?
These are shared calendars on top of everyone’s own. Pick as many or as few as you like. You can always add more later.
Names stay in this browser. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Nobody’s grading you. Do a few steps tonight and the rest this weekend.
That’s every box
Your family calendar is set up. Now nobody has to be the only one who knows what’s happening today.
Got a kid under 13? Read this.
- Use their real birthday. Walking a kid through a fake birth year teaches them that lying about their age gets them what they want, and fixing a wrong birthday later means contacting Google.
- Their account comes from Family Link. Google’s free parental controls app creates Google Accounts for kids under 13. The Android setup checklist walks through it.
- Check whether their own calendar can be shared. Google’s help pages don’t say either way. The plan has you look for the sharing setting while you’re signed in as them. If it isn’t there, the Family calendar Google made for your family group covers them until they turn 13.
Special situations
- All-iPhone family? This still works. Google Calendar runs great on iPhone and shows up in the iPhone’s own Calendar app too. (There’s also an Apple-only way, but that’s a different setup.)
- Two households? Sharing between co-parents in separate homes works the same way, but deciding who sees what is a bigger conversation. Start with just the kids’ calendars.
- School or work accounts don’t act like personal ones. The school or company decides whether they can share calendars, so use a personal Google account for the family setup.
- School only posts a PDF? There’s nothing to subscribe to. Add the big dates by hand once, and ask the school whether it has a calendar link.
Straight from Google
Every step here comes from Google’s own help articles, in case you want to dig deeper.
- Share your calendar
- Subscribe to someone else’s calendar (including from a link)
- Create a new calendar
- Use a family calendar on Google
- Create a Google Account (including with an email you already have)
- Create a Google Account for your child
- Add Google Calendar events to Apple Calendar
- Change Google Calendar notifications
- Add or remove holidays on your calendar
- Manage birthdays on your calendar
- Create & manage tasks in Google Calendar