How to share a Google Calendar with someone outside your company

Google Calendar gives you three ways to share a calendar with someone outside your organisation: share it with a specific person by email, make it public with a link, or hand out its secret iCal address. On a personal Gmail account all three work. On a Google Workspace account, the first two are usually restricted by your administrator — most companies cap external sharing at “free/busy only” or block it entirely, so the option you want is often greyed out. The other thing to know is what each option exposes: two of the three hand over full event details. If what you actually need is for someone to see when you're free, there's a way to do that without any Google sharing at all.

Option 1: Share with a specific person

In Google Calendar on the web, hover the calendar in the left sidebar, open its menu, choose Settings and sharing, and under Share with specific people or groups add their email address. You choose a permission level: see only free/busy, see all event details, make changes, or make changes and manage sharing.

On a personal account this just works, and “free/busy only” is the safe choice. On a Workspace account, the permission levels available for an outside address are whatever your admin allowed — commonly free/busy only, sometimes nothing. If the address is rejected or the detail levels are missing, that's policy, not a bug, and asking IT for an exception is the only fix.

Option 2: Make the calendar public

Same settings page, Access permissions for events, tick Make available to public. You can limit it to free/busy. Anyone with the link — or, for a public calendar, anyone who searches — can then see it.

This is the bluntest tool. Public means public: there is no per-person revocation, and if you leave it at “see all event details” your whole calendar is readable by anyone who finds the link. Workspace admins disable this for most organisations, and they're right to.

Option 3: The secret iCal address

Under Integrate calendar you'll find a Secret address in iCal format. Paste it into any calendar app — Outlook, Apple Calendar, another Google account — and it subscribes to a read-only copy.

Two cautions. It always includes full event details; there is no free/busy version of the feed. And the address isthe credential: anyone who has it can read everything, and the only way to revoke one person is to reset the address, which cuts off everyone. Subscribers also refresh on their app's schedule — often hours behind. Our guide to syncing Google and Outlook goes deeper on this route.

What each option exposes

The question behind the question

Almost nobody outside your company needs your calendar. They need to know when you're free so they can suggest or book a time. That is a different thing to share, and it sidesteps every problem above: no Google permission to grant, no admin policy to fight, no event details to expose, and it works whether the other person uses Google, Outlook, or nothing.

BusyBoard is the automated way to do that: it reads your calendars and gives you a link that shows only your busy and free time — across every calendar you connect, in the viewer's timezone — with optional booking that lands for your approval. You revoke it by resetting the link. See how to share your availability without sharing your calendar.