7 ways to troubleshoot if your iPhone calendar is not syncing

• If your iPhone calendar is not syncing, restart the Calendar app or refresh the view. 
• You should also make sure the calendars are on and set to back up to iCloud. 
• Here are seven ways to troubleshoot and solve problems with the calendar not syncing on your iPhone.

Your iPhone isn’t just for calls and text messages (and a thousand other communication and social media apps) — it’s also your scheduler. Apple’s Calendar app keeps most iPhone users up to date on their daily itinerary. But sometimes, the iPhone calendar doesn’t sync properly. If that’s happened to you, here are seven common troubleshooting tricks for getting the iPhone calendar working properly.

Restart the Calendar app and refresh your calendar

If the Calendar app isn’t properly reflecting your schedule, sometimes it’s as simple as a temporary glitch in the app, and you can fix it by refreshing or restarting the app.

Start by refreshing the app — open the Calendar app and swipe down from the top to force it to refresh and sync with the online data in iCloud. If that doesn’t solve the problem, you can force the app to close and then restart it. 

Make sure you’re showing all calendars

Sometimes, the reason you can’t see all your calendar data is that it’s being combined from multiple calendars, and one or more of them are “turned off.” This can happen by accident, or you might have intentionally muted a calendar at some point in the past if it had info you didn’t need to see. To check, start the Calendar app and tap Calendars at the bottom of the screen. Make sure all the calendars — or at least all the calendars you need — are selected. You can simply tap Show All at the bottom of the screen, then tap Done. 

Make sure your account’s calendars are turned on 

If you have multiple email accounts on your iPhone, each account might have its own calendar as well. Gmail accounts, for example, all have their own calendars. It’s possible the calendar in one or more of these accounts is disabled, and not syncing with your iPhone. To check, start the Settings app and then tap Mail. On the Mail page, tap Accounts. Then tap an account name and, if you see Calendars, make sure it’s enabled by swiping the button to the right. Repeat that for each of your accounts. 

Check to see if the iCloud Calendar service is online

To keep your iPhone’s calendars in sync, Apple relies on an online service. It has a very high uptime, but it’s always possible that the service is temporarily offline. To find out, visit the Apple System Status webpage and see if iCloud Calendar has a green status light. If it doesn’t, you’ll need to wait until the system is back online. 

Turn on iCloud backup for calendars

You probably already back up your iPhone to iCloud, and part of that backup includes your calendars. But if you have multiple devices — like an iPhone and iPad — you should be backing up all of them to iCloud. If you added a calendar entry on your iPad, for example, it might not sync with your iPhone unless you’re backing up both the iPad and your iPhone to iCloud. There are exceptions, of course: For example, a Google Calendar event should back up through Google whether or not the calendar event is backed up to iCloud. But in general, it’s a good idea to do this. 

On your iPhone, start the Settings app and tap your account name at the top of the screen. Tap iCloud and then make sure Calendars is enabled by swiping the button to the right. Repeat that process on your iPad to make sure your calendars appear on both devices. 

Resync with iCloud

It’s possible that your calendars are in iCloud but due to a glitch, some entries aren’t finding their way to your phone. You may be able to solve this problem by turning iCloud off, then on again. Start Settings on your iPhone and tap your account name at the top of the screen. Tap iCloud and then turn off Calendars by swiping the button to the left. In the pop-up menu, choose Keep on My iPhone. Wait a moment, then swipe that button to the right to turn it back on. Select Merge to combine your phone’s contacts with iCloud. 

Update your iPhone

While this is somewhat unlikely to solve the calendar issue — which is why we saved it for last — it’s always possible that a bug or incompatibility could be keeping the calendar data from displaying properly. Check to make sure your iPhone’s operating system is fully up to date, and make sure the Calendar app is up to date as well.