How to change your business hours on Google

Wrong opening hours are the most expensive small error on a Business Profile. Someone drives over, finds a locked door, and leaves a one-star review that outlives the mistake by years.

Google splits hours across four separate settings, and most of the confusion comes from editing the wrong one. Here is what each does.

Changing your regular hours

Google's own walkthrough is here; the short version:

1. Open your Business Profile — search your business name while signed in, or go through Google Maps.
2. Select Edit profile, then Hours.
3. Next to "Hours", select the edit icon, then Open with main hours.
4. Tick each day you are open, and set the times with the dropdowns.
5. Select Save.

Two variations people hunt for:

• A lunchtime closure, or any split shift. Set the morning period, select Add hours, then set the afternoon period on the same day. Two entries, one day.

• Open around the clock. Under Opens at, choose 24 hours.

• Closing after midnight. Set the closing time to the early-morning hour — a bar open until 2am is one entry, not two days.

• Closed on a given day. Leave that day unticked rather than entering 00:00 to 00:00.

Google reviews changes before publishing them, so an edit may not appear the instant you save it.

More than one location

In Business Profile Manager, select the locations from the list and use Actions in the toolbar to apply the same change across all of them. It is the only sane way to handle a chain's bank-holiday hours, and it is the same menu that marks locations open or closed in bulk.

Holiday and one-off hours

Special hours override your regular week for specific dates. Around a bank holiday Google will often prompt you to confirm the date, which is worth doing even when nothing changes — a confirmed date displays with more confidence than an unconfirmed guess.

1. Edit profile, then Hours.
2. Next to "Special hours", select the edit icon.
3. Either select Review on a date Google suggests, or select Add a date and enter your own.
4. Closed all day? Leave the Closed box ticked. Open, but differently? Untick it and enter the hours.
5. Save.

Two rules are worth committing to memory. Special hours run for a maximum of six days in a row. And they only display if your profile is set to "Open with main hours" — a profile with no regular hours has nothing for them to override.

Set the whole year's holidays in one sitting. It takes ten minutes and removes the annual scramble on Christmas Eve.

Delivery, collection and other "more hours"

If you run different hours for a specific service, they belong under More hours rather than in your main week.

1. Edit profile, then Hours.
2. Under Add more hours, choose the type — delivery, takeaway, drive-through, collection.
3. Set the days and times for that type.
4. Save, and repeat for each type separately.

More hours do not display until regular hours exist, and Google's guidance is to keep them inside your main hours: a kitchen that stops taking orders at 9pm in a venue open until 11pm, not the other way round.

Temporary and permanent closures

Temporarily closed is for a shutdown of seven days or more, a seasonal break, or a closure with no known end date. Edit profile → Hours → next to "Hours", Edit → Temporarily closed → Save. Customers see "Temporarily closed" rather than assuming you have gone for good.

Be aware of the trade-off Google states openly: temporarily-closed businesses can rank after open ones, depending on category, query and how many competitors are in the same position. That is still better than showing open hours when the door is locked.

Permanently closed follows the same path. The profile can still surface for people searching for you by name.

To reopen, set your main hours again — that clears the closed status. Managing several locations, you can select them in Business Profile Manager and use Actions to open or close in bulk.

One warning worth its own line: if a profile was marked permanently closed because the business moved or was renamed, do not reopen it. Google's instruction is to add a new profile and verify that instead — reopening the old one leaves you with an address history that never quite settles.

Why your edits keep reverting

Hours are not a field only you can write to. Google assembles them from several signals, including your own website and suggested edits from the public. When the profile and the site disagree, the edit you made by hand is the one likely to be overruled.

So the fix is rarely on the profile:

• Put your hours on your website as text, not as an image of a sign, and keep them current.
• Use structured data — openingHoursSpecification on your LocalBusiness markup — so the hours are machine-readable rather than inferred.
• Make sure every other listing agrees. The same reasoning applies to your name, address and phone number: one inconsistent record is survivable, a dozen is a signal that nobody is sure which business is which.

If your profile is new, or you have not claimed it yet, start with adding and verifying the business — hours on an unverified profile are a suggestion, not a setting.

Hours are a ranking input, not just a courtesy

Hours feed the "open now" filter, the "closes soon" label in the local pack, and the decision a customer makes in the four seconds they look at your listing. A profile with no hours cannot appear for an "open now" search at all, which quietly removes you from a slice of demand you never see in reporting.

They also sit alongside categories and reviews as one of the completeness signals for a profile. Filling them in properly costs ten minutes once, plus ten minutes a year for holidays.

The ten-minute version

Set regular hours. Add the year's holidays as special hours in one sitting. Put delivery or collection under more hours. Use temporarily closed for anything over a week. Then fix the hours on your own website, because that is where the contradictions come from.

Keeping a profile current is part of the local work inside our SEO service, usually alongside the reviews process — the two together are what the map pack actually responds to. If you would like someone to own it, tell us about the business.