Learn how to show upcoming birthdays for family and friends in Apple Calendar on an iPhone, iPad, Mac, and the web so you never forget to congratulate them again.
Apple’s Calendar app is great for events and appointments, but did you know it can also display birthdays? Provided you’ve saved people’s birth dates in the built-in Contacts app, upcoming birthdays can optionally show up on your calendar.
You’ll also see what age someone just turned, and you can even elect to receive timely birthday notifications in advance. But first, you must enable this option by following the steps in this tutorial.
1) Add birthdays in the Contacts app
The Calendar app fetches birthdays from the Contacts app. To add a birthday, edit a contact and tap Add Birthday, then select the day, month, and year they were born (used to calcuate their age). You can also add a birthday when saving a contact.
Updated birthdays in Contacts may not be instantly reflected in the Calendar app because it may take up to an hour to sync everywhere via iCloud.
2) Set the Calendar app to show birthdays
The next step is to turn on the birthday option in the Calendar app.
iPhone and iPad
Open the Calendar app and hit the calendar icon (on older iOS versions, tap “Calendar” instead) and tick the box next to Birthdays, then hit the checkmark icon in the top-right corner to save your changes.
Birthdays appear alognside other calendar events and appointments. Tap a birthday on the calendar to show the person’s contact card. To hide birthdays from the calendar, repeat the above steps but untick the Birthdays calendar.
Mac
Open the Calendar app and click the calendar icon near the window’s top-left corner, then hover over the Other heading and click the downward-pointed arrow to expand the section. Next, tick the box next to Birthdays to show upcoming birthdays in Calendar on your Mac.
If you don’t see the Birthdays calendar, click the Calendar > Settings menu and be sure to tick the box next to “Show Birthday calendar.”
iCloud.com
Visit iCloud.com/calendar in a web browser on your cpomputer and log in with your Apple account. Now click the tiny calendar icon near the window’s top-left corner and tick the box next to Birthdays to turn on the birhday calendar.
Don’t see the Birthdays option? Click the three-dotted icon and choose Settings from the menu, then tick the box next to “Show Birthdays calendar.”
3) Set notifications for upcoming birthdays
You can configure the Calendar app to notify you about upcoming birthdays on the actual day or at an earlier time. This is a very useful feature to ensure that you won’t forget to congratulate friends on birthdays and buy gifts.
iPhone and iPad
Go to Settings > Apps > Calendar > Default Alert Times > Birthdays and choose between these scheduling options: On day of event (9 AM), 1 day before (9 AM), 2 days before (9 AM), or 1 week before. Also, be sure to check whether the Calendar app is permitted to send you alerts in Settings > Notifications > Calendar.
Mac
In the Calendar app, click the Calendar > Settings menu and then select the Alerts tab. You can now set the notification schedule in the Birthdays menu. If you’d like to schedule alerts for events, all-day events, and birthdays separately on each device, tick the box next to “Use these default alerts on only this computer.”
There are other ways to keep track of birthdays on an iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The solution we jsut showed youis great if you don’t want to download any extra apps.
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