How to Check for Holidays on Calendar using Shortcuts

by Rian

One of the big reasons why I keep things on Mac and iOS as platforms, compared to, say, Windows, is because how customizable even the basic apps are. The power of Shortcuts lies in its easy access. Last year or so, I did recommend this particular shortcut as my go-to. In my defense, I previously had it setup with third-party apps, not the Apple’s Calendar apps, making it less universal.

I would like to explain what this particular shortcut intends to do. The idea behind of it all is to have a shortcut that can cross-examine whether the specified date is a holiday on Apple Calendar; which, on the Calendar app, appears as an all-day event.

For example, for upcoming Memorial Day, May 26th, some businesses will observe the holiday. If you wanted to schedule an appointment on the business day, normally you would need to verify it manually per event and per holiday. If you have multiple calendars from different organizations, it’s better to automate the process.

1. Download the shortcut through this link.
2. The shortcut checks the all-day event (e.g. holiday) against the Apple Calendar’s. If you have specific calendar in mind, it must be accessible on the Calendar app.
3. The shortcut takes a dictionary, such as this:

{"date": "someDate", "cal": "MyCal"}

Following example would return True as NYSE observes the Memorial Day on 26th:

{"date": "5/26/25", "cal": "NYSE Holidays"}

As always, feel free to give it a go. It’s a simple shortcut that checks against the default Calendar app. It’s best used as a subroutine to be called from another shortcut — to see if the date in question is eligible. It can be modified to work with third-party app if it supports Shortcuts — the beauty of Shortcuts, really. Also, if you are using it quite often for one particular calendar, I would suggest making duplicate shortcut so that it would take the data format instead of dictionary format.