How to share a Google Calendar with your family
To share a Google Calendar with your family, open the calendar's Settings and sharing page and add each person's email address under Share with specific people or groups, choosing how much of it they may see. Everyone you add opens the calendar inside their own Google Calendar, so this works when the whole family already uses Google.
This page covers the permission levels, the separate family calendar that comes with a Google family group, and what changes when one person in the household uses iCloud or Outlook instead.
Share one of your calendars with specific people
- On a computer, open Google Calendar and find the calendar under My calendars on the left.
- Point at it, open the three-dot menu, then choose Settings and sharing.
- Under Share with specific people or groups, select Add people and groups.
- Enter a family member's email address and pick a permission level.
- Select Send.
The person gets an email and has to select the link in it before the calendar appears in their own Google Calendar (Google Calendar Help).
The permission levels are (Google Calendar Help):
- See only free/busy (hide details) — times appear as busy, with no titles, locations or notes.
- See event details — the whole event, read-only.
- Make changes (see private events as free/busy) — can edit, but private events stay hidden.
- Make changes and see event details — can edit everything.
- Make changes and manage sharing — can also add and remove other people.
For a partner, make changes and see event details is usually right for a shared household calendar and see only free/busy for a work one. A grandparent who only needs to know when to collect a child is fine with see event details.
The calendar that comes with a Google family group
Setting up a family on Google creates one shared Family calendar for the group. Everyone in the family can add and edit events on it, manage how it is shared and rename it, and the family manager owns it by default and can hand that ownership to somebody else (Google Calendar Help).
Two things about it are worth knowing before the household relies on it. Someone who leaves the family group loses access to the calendar, and if the family manager deletes the group, the calendar and its events stay behind and have to be deleted by hand. Google also emails guardians when a family member under 13 shares that calendar, makes it public or changes what other people may do with it.
The family calendar is an extra calendar everybody writes into. It does not show each person's own calendars, so it sits alongside the individual shares above rather than replacing them.
What to avoid
Make available to public is not a sharing shortcut. It puts the calendar on the open internet, where it can be found in search results and subscribed to by anyone, which is not what "share with my family" means.
Counting the shares is the other thing worth doing early. Each share covers one calendar, for one person, in one direction. Two parents who each want to see the other's work and personal calendars need four shares; add a grandparent and it is six. Every calendar added later has to be shared again with everyone.
When not everyone uses Google
A Google Calendar share opens in Google Calendar. A parent whose work runs on Microsoft 365, or whose phone keeps the family's appointments in iCloud, cannot accept it into the calendar they actually use. The usual workaround — publishing a calendar as an ICS link and subscribing to it elsewhere — gives a read-only copy that the other app refreshes on its own schedule rather than immediately.
Children are the other gap: sharing needs an email address on both ends, and younger children have no account to share with.
How to do it with Alfie
Alfie is our product, a family calendar app that takes the opposite approach: instead of every person sharing every calendar with every other person, each person connects the calendar accounts they already use and the household gets one week view. Google Calendar, Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com, iCloud through an app-specific password, and any CalDAV server sync both ways; public ICS links are read-only. Google reviewed and approved Alfie's access to Google Calendar in September 2026.
How much of a calendar the rest of the household sees is set once per calendar — Full details, Busy only or Hidden — not once per person, and a calendar marked as a work calendar starts at busy only. Children are added as profiles with a name and their own calendar, managed by a parent, with no account, email address or password of their own.
You can then ask the assistant what is on tomorrow, when a child's swimming lesson is, or when everyone is free, and it answers from what you are allowed to see.
To set it up, create a household, connect your Google account, invite the family with a link, and check the sharing level on each calendar. It takes about ten minutes, and Alfie is free to use.