What is Special hours?
Special hours apply to individual days and override the regular hours only there. Typical occasions are public holidays, bridge days, company holidays, a stocktake or a day with extended opening. Google Business Profile and Apple Business have a separate field for this, so the regular hours stay untouched and apply again by themselves once the occasion has passed.
The most common mistake is not entering them at all. On the public holidays Google knows for each country, it shows a warning in the profile that your hours might differ. If you are open on those days, you lose customers who would rather not make the trip than stand in front of a locked door. The second common mistake is changing the regular hours for a holiday and then forgetting to change them back.
On the website, the same days belong visibly on the contact page and in machine-readable form in the LocalBusiness markup. There, `openingHoursSpecification` with `validFrom` and `validThrough` can express date ranges, including a closure over several days. Because Google and Apple check changes against the website, special hours that exist only in the profile are a claim with nothing to back them up.
Why does Special hours matter?
Opening hours are not a side field. In Whitespark's Local Search Ranking Factors 2026 study, 47 experts rank "business is open at time of search" fifth out of 187 factors for map results, and in a BrightLocal survey of 1,138 people in the US in September 2023, 26 per cent said they turn up at a business too early or too late at least once a month because of wrong opening hours.
Special hours in practice
- 01A bakery enters its hours for 24 and 31 December back in October, instead of changing its regular hours on 23 December.
- 02A trades business sets three weeks of company holidays in August as special hours in its profile and as a date range with `validFrom` and `validThrough` in its markup.
- 03A shop in Austria that opens on 8 December enters the day explicitly as open, so no holiday warning puts customers off.
