In short and in plain language
Your Google profile shows your opening hours. On public holidays, your hours often change. The profile only knows this if you add it.
31 October is a public holiday in Lower Saxony. Christmas and New Year are days off too. Add these days early.
Are you closed for six days in a row or fewer? Then mark each day as closed. After that, your usual hours come back on their own.
Are you closed for longer? Then Google has its own switch: your business is shown as closed for a while. After the break, you switch it back yourself.
Google shows a note after a change. You can add to it, for example the day you open again. We are happy to help.
On Saturday, 31 October 2026, someone in Hildesheim looks up the bike shop or the shoe shop round the corner and reads in the Google profile: open until 1 pm. The door stays shut all the same, because Reformation Day is a public holiday in Lower Saxony (Section 2 NFeiertagsG). The profile has not made a mistake; it only knows the regular hours. That is exactly what special hours are for: for holidays or special events, they can be set separately in the Business Profile (Google Business Profile Help). A few weeks later comes the second round with Christmas Eve, the Christmas holidays, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, and many businesses close for company holidays between Christmas and New Year. This article shows how to record public holidays and closure days in the profile correctly, when special hours are enough and when a business counts as temporarily closed, what Google displays in the profile after the change, and how More hours for pickup or delivery fit in.
Key takeaways
- 31 October is one of 10 officially recognised public holidays in Lower Saxony (Section 2 NFeiertagsG). In 2026 it falls on a Saturday; without an entry, the profile shows the regular Saturday hours that day.
- On 24 and 31 December, shops in Lower Saxony may only open after 2 pm as exceptions such as pharmacies, petrol stations and station shops (Section 3 NLöffVZG). The shortened hours belong in the profile as special hours.
- Special hours cover closures of up to 6 days in a row (Google Business Profile Help). They apply only on the dates entered; afterwards the profile returns to the regular week by itself.
- From 7 days in a row, one Google help page recommends “temporarily closed”, another only from more than 7 days (Google Business Profile Help). This status has to be removed by hand after the holidays.
- After a change to the opening hours, the profile shows a notice and, on mobile devices, a post about it (Google Business Profile Help). Add your first working day and how to reach you, or delete it.
- Pickup, delivery and takeout get their own More hours, which should generally sit within the main hours (Google Business Profile Help). For a single day that differs, special hours remain the right tool.
What a profile without special hours shows on 31 October
The Lower Saxony Public Holidays Act lists 10 officially recognised public holidays, with 31 October as Reformation Day under letter h (Section 2 NFeiertagsG). These are days of general rest from work (Section 3 NFeiertagsG). For the Google profile, this changes nothing at first: it shows whatever is stored as the regular week. In 2026, Reformation Day falls on a Saturday, precisely the day on which many shops, bakeries, workshops and farm shops open for shorter hours, but open nonetheless. Anyone checking on Friday evening whether they can still pick something up the next morning sees the Saturday hours if nothing has been entered.
Google knows the date anyway. In its holiday list for Germany, the Business Profile Help lists 31 October 2026 as Reformation Day for 9 federal states, including Lower Saxony (Google Business Profile Help). On the holidays listed there, the profile may show a warning that the business's hours might differ. For people searching, that is the least helpful answer: the profile names a time and casts doubt on it in the same moment. Anyone who does not call then sets off on the off chance or keeps looking, and both happen without you.
The same list contains days that are not public holidays at all. Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve appear in it for the whole of Germany (Google Business Profile Help), although the Lower Saxony holidays act does not list them (Section 2 NFeiertagsG). For profile maintenance, what counts is therefore not only the law but also the days on which Google expects a notice. Between 31 October and 1 January, the list contains 6 dates for a business in Lower Saxony (Google Business Profile Help). How the profile as a whole is set up and maintained is described on our page about the Google Business Profile.
Confirm holidays even if your hours do not change
The public holiday calendar in Lower Saxony until January
For the rest of the year, the list is short and fully known. The overview names the days a business in Lower Saxony should check in its profile between late October and early January, with the day of the week, the legal status and the matching entry.
| Date | Day of the week | Status in Lower Saxony (Section 2 NFeiertagsG, Section 3 NLöffVZG) | Profile entry |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31 Oct 2026 | Saturday | Reformation Day, public holiday | Closed, or confirm holiday hours |
| 24 Dec 2026 | Thursday | Christmas Eve, working day; shops only until 2 pm, exceptions after that | Enter shortened hours |
| 25 Dec 2026 | Friday | Christmas Day, public holiday | Confirm as closed |
| 26 Dec 2026 | Saturday | 2nd Christmas Day, public holiday | Confirm as closed |
| 31 Dec 2026 | Thursday | New Year's Eve, working day; shops only until 2 pm, exceptions after that | Enter shortened hours |
| 1 Jan 2027 | Friday | New Year's Day, public holiday | Confirm as closed |
The rule for Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve is set out in the shop opening act: on 24 and 31 December, opening after 2 pm is only permitted for pharmacies, petrol stations and sales outlets at railway stations, airports and ferry ports, and for these only for the purposes named in the act (Section 3 NLöffVZG). For a shop in Hildesheim's town centre, this means the profile should show closing time at 2 pm at the latest on both days, even if it is normally open until 6 pm on Thursdays. Businesses without retail sales, such as a medical practice, an office or a tradesperson working at the customer's premises, are not covered by this rule. People still search for them on these days, and many close early too.
Some trades may open on Sundays and public holidays and therefore have an extra item on the list. The shop opening act allows bakeries, florists and farm shops, for example, narrowly limited opening hours on such days and requires these hours to be displayed in the entrance area so that they can be read from outside (Section 4 NLöffVZG). Anyone who makes use of this on a public holiday should enter exactly those hours as special hours in the profile; otherwise the door shows the right time and Google another.
All Saints' Day, the Day of Repentance and Prayer and Epiphany appear in Google's list only for other federal states. In Lower Saxony, 18 November and 6 January are ordinary working days, and 1 November falls on a Sunday in 2026 anyway. An entry is only needed on these days if the business opens differently for reasons of its own.
Adding special hours step by step
Special hours do not change the regular week. If you add them for a brief period, for example for a special event, your regular hours stay as they are (Google Business Profile Help), and the special hours appear only on the dates given. That makes them suitable for anything with a foreseeable end: public holidays, bridge days, a stocktake, a shortened day because of a staff meeting.
- Open your Business Profile and select Edit profile, then Hours.
- In the “Business hours” section, next to “Special hours”, select Edit.
- Confirm a suggested date with Review, or create a date of your own with Add a date.
- For a closure day, check the Closed box; for a shortened day, uncheck it and enter the hours.
- For a lunch break or two time slots, add further hours for the same day through the three-dot menu.
- Select Save and check the result in the “Hours” tab under “Business information”.
One requirement is easily overlooked: for special hours to appear in the profile, the option “Open with main hours” must be selected (Google Business Profile Help). If you have hidden your hours entirely so far, first store a regular week and then the exceptions.
Businesses that work past midnight face a second limit: the maximum period for a single special hours entry is 24 hours (Google Business Profile Help). If the time starts before midnight and only ends after midday on the next day, it is split into two entries: one until the end of the first day and one from midnight on the second day. On that second day, Google then shows the special hours rather than the regular ones. For a restaurant with a long New Year's Eve and a New Year's brunch, this is the case that needs planning in advance.
Several locations via spreadsheet
Company holidays: six days or longer
With company holidays, the length of the closure decides which tool fits in the profile. According to Google, special hours also apply when a business stays closed for 6 days in a row or fewer (Google Business Profile Help). Three days of stocktaking in January or the days between the holidays can be covered this way, day by day with the “Closed” box checked. The advantage: on the first working day afterwards, the profile shows the regular week again by itself, without anyone having to remember it.
If the closure lasts longer, Google provides a different status. If a business stays closed for at least seven consecutive days or for an indefinite period, it should be marked as temporarily closed (Google Business Profile Help). The help page on closing a business draws the line one day later: only for more than seven days, for the off-season or indefinitely does it call for “Temporarily closed”, while for seven days or fewer it points to special hours (Google Business Profile Help).
In practice, this means: up to six days, special hours are clearly right; from eight days, it is the temporary closure. Anyone closing for exactly seven days falls between two help pages. Here it pays to choose the period deliberately: if there is a day with emergency cover or limited order intake anyway, it is entered as a shortened day, and the closure in a row stays at six days.
Two examples from the 2026 calendar make the difference tangible. A business closed from Thursday, 24 December, up to and including Friday, 1 January 2027, is shut for nine calendar days in a row. According to both help pages, that is a case for “temporarily closed”. If the same business instead opens for shorter hours on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve and only closes from 25 to 30 December, that is six days in a row, counting the Sunday. Special hours cover this, and 1 January is confirmed as a single holiday.
| Closure in a row | Profile entry (Google Business Profile Help) | Return to the regular week |
|---|---|---|
| Single public holiday | Special hours with “Closed” checked | Automatically the next day |
| 2 to 6 days | Special hours for each day | Automatically after the last entry |
| Exactly 7 days | Help pages contradict each other; plan the period to be unambiguous | Depends on the chosen route |
| More than 7 days, off-season or indefinite | “Temporarily closed” | By hand: mark as open again |
Temporarily closed: what customers see and how to undo it
The “Temporarily closed” status appears on Google Maps and in Google Search (Google Business Profile Help). Anyone searching for the business by name can see that it is only unavailable for a while and does not make a wasted trip. It is set under “Edit profile” and “Hours” with the “Temporarily closed” option.
It has a side effect worth knowing: for broad queries, temporarily closed businesses can rank after open ones (Google Business Profile Help). Someone looking for a joiner in Hildesheim during the holidays is therefore more likely to see the businesses that are working. For the duration of the closure, that is logical, and it is one more reason not to leave the status in place longer than necessary.
Yet that happens easily, because the status does not end by itself. You undo it in the same place: edit the hours, select “Open with main hours”, check the days of the week and save (Google Business Profile Help). On the first working day after the holidays there is a lot to catch up on, and the profile is rarely at the top of the list. A fixed calendar reminder, a named person and a quick look at the profile on a smartphone take care of it in a few minutes. Who needs access to the profile for this, and how access is shared properly, is covered in our article on how to verify and protect your business profile.
For seasonal businesses such as an ice cream parlour, a beer garden or a farm shop with a harvest season, Google provides its own route: the regular hours are those of the season, the business can be marked as temporarily closed in the off-season, and the regular hours are set again on reopening (Google Business Profile Help). Here too, the switch does not happen automatically; it belongs in the calendar.
Do not choose “Permanently closed”
Notice and post: what appears after the change
A change to the opening hours does not go unnoticed in the profile. Google shows a message on the Business Profile confirming the updated hours, and on mobile devices a post in the Updates tab confirms that the hours were changed (Google Business Profile Help). You can edit this post and add further information. If you want neither the message nor the post to appear, simply delete the post.
For company holidays, the post is an opportunity the bare date does not offer. It can say when the business is reachable again, how urgent matters are handled in the meantime and until when orders are still accepted before the break. One note from the help belongs here: posts with a phone number in the description may be rejected if it cannot be confirmed that the number belongs to the business they are published for (Google Business Profile Help). An emergency number is therefore better placed in the profile itself or on the website the post links to.
- The closure period with days of the week, for example “Friday, 25 December, to Wednesday, 30 December”
- The first working day afterwards and the hours on that day
- How urgent requests reach you in the meantime, referring to the website rather than a phone number in the text
- Until when orders, appointments or pickups are still possible before the break
- A button to the matching page of the website, such as contact or appointment booking
Your own posts can be prepared in advance: with “Schedule this post”, you choose the date and time of publication (Google Business Profile Help). For a holiday notice, the “Updates” post type fits. A rule from the help is useful for tidying up: posts older than six months are archived unless a date range has been set (Google Business Profile Help). A holiday notice without a date range could therefore, in the worst case, remain until the summer. After the holidays, delete it or replace it with a current post. How posts are built in general is explained in our guide to optimising your Google Business Profile.
More hours: pickup, delivery, takeout
Alongside regular and special hours, the profile has a third level. Under More hours, you set times for specific services, such as delivery, takeout, drive-through and kerbside pickup (Google Business Profile Help). They can only be added once regular hours have been set, and they should generally be a subset of them. Each type is set up separately, with its own days and times.
In autumn and winter, this level becomes relevant for many businesses. A bakery handing out pre-ordered stollen on the mornings before Christmas, a restaurant offering takeaway menus on Advent weekends, a drinks retailer with a delivery service for parties: all of them have a second time besides the shop hours that customers need to know. If it only appears on a notice in the window, interested customers still call or turn up at the wrong hour.
More hours describe a recurring week with their own days and times. For a single day that differs, special hours remain the tool. Anyone combining both checks the profile view after saving to see whether the right time appears for the holiday, and looks at the profile on a smartphone, the way searchers see it on the move. For retailers and restaurants that offer pickup and delivery times, our pages on web design for retail and web design for restaurants show how website and profile work together.
Decide early, enter in advance
The earlier the dates are fixed, the less rush there is in December. Google itself points out that special hours for holidays can be set in advance (Google Business Profile Help). Reformation Day can therefore be entered today, along with the Christmas holidays and New Year's Day. What is in the profile now does not have to be added under time pressure in December.
With company holidays, the timing often depends on agreement within the team. Where there is a works council, it has a right of co-determination in drawing up general holiday principles and the holiday schedule (Section 87 BetrVG). That is one reason to settle the holidays early. In smaller businesses without a works council, the owner usually decides, and then the date should not only be pinned up in the staff room but be in the profile the same day.
Whatever is in the profile should also appear on the website, on the answering machine and in the out-of-office reply. What a list of all deviating days with one column per channel looks like is described in our article on getting the website ready for the Christmas trade. If you take appointments online, block the days in the booking calendar in the same step, as described in the article on online appointment booking for local businesses.
On the website itself, special hours can also be marked up in machine-readable form. In its structured data documentation for local businesses, Google describes the properties validFrom and validThrough for deviating periods; a day closed all day is marked by setting opens and closes to “00:00” (Google Search Central). For the nine days of holidays from the example above, the snippet would look like this:
"openingHoursSpecification": {
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"opens": "00:00",
"closes": "00:00",
"validFrom": "2026-12-24",
"validThrough": "2027-01-01"
}How such markup is built into a website and tested is covered in the article on rich snippets for local businesses. The markup does not replace the entry in the profile; it complements it, because the profile is what searchers see first on the map and in the results.
Common mistakes with special hours
- Holiday not confirmed: even if the business is closed on 31 October anyway, the profile may show the notice about differing hours without an entry.
- Permanently instead of temporarily closed: one click in the wrong place, and the profile announces that the business has shut down.
- Status forgotten: “Temporarily closed” stays in place until someone removes it, even if the business has long been working again.
- Wrong year: anyone creating a custom date in December can easily put 1 January into the current year instead of the next.
- Empty columns in the bulk upload: with several locations, empty columns with a heading erase existing data.
- Phone number in the post: a holiday notice with a phone number in the text may be rejected; the number belongs in the profile.
- Notice and profile contradict each other: the new sign hangs on the door, while Google still shows last year's hours.
The same mistakes affect directories and city portals where your opening hours also appear. How to keep these listings consistent is shown in our article on consistent business listings in the region. The effort is manageable if it is done in one go in autumn rather than spread across December.
Timeline from 19 October to early January
The holidays are fixed, and so are the days of the week. That makes it possible to spread profile maintenance over five short appointments.
- This week: enter Reformation Day on Saturday, 31 October, as special hours, either closed or with holiday hours.
- By mid-November: fix company holidays and shortened days, and decide whether special hours are enough or the business will be marked as temporarily closed.
- Early December: enter 24, 25, 26 and 31 December and 1 January 2027, check More hours for pickup or delivery and prepare a post about the holidays.
- On the last working day before the break: for a longer closure, set “Temporarily closed” and check the profile view on a smartphone.
- On the first working day afterwards: remove the status, delete or replace the holiday post and check the hours for the new year.
A profile that shows the right hours on public holidays answers the question before anyone is standing at a locked door.
If you would rather not keep track of this yourself, hand it over: maintaining opening and special hours is part of our care for your Google Business Profile. We enter public holidays and company holidays in advance, set and remove the status for longer closures and align the profile with your website and directories as part of our local SEO support. And if you also want to be visible with ads in your area in the run-up to the holidays, the article on Google Ads for local businesses shows how location targeting keeps the budget focused on your own catchment area.
Related Articles
Google Business Profile Posts for Advent Offers and Events
Update, offer or event: what Google requires for Business Profile posts, why a date range matters and what a post plan from November to January looks like.
Website FAQ Sections: What They Still Do After the Snippet
Since 7 May 2026 Google no longer shows FAQ rich results. What an FAQ section on your website is still good for, how to maintain it and what happens to markup.
Local Backlinks: How Hildesheim Businesses Build Them
Links from your club, guild, supplier and local paper feed into your business's prominence. How to earn them and when a link has to be marked sponsored.