How to Share a Google Calendar Without Showing Event Details

Sometimes you want people to know when you're free without them seeing exactly what you're doing. Maybe you're sharing your schedule with a coworker, a babysitter, or extended family — they need to see your blocks of time, but not your doctor appointments or personal reminders.

Google Calendar has a built-in way to handle this. Here's how it works, plus a different approach for when you want to share a specific set of events (like a kid's soccer schedule) without touching your personal calendar at all.

How to share your calendar with free/busy only

When you share a Google Calendar with someone, you can choose the permission level. "See only free/busy (hide details)" is exactly what it sounds like — they see that you're busy during a time block, but not the event name, location, or description.

Steps to share with free/busy permissions

1. Go to calendar.google.com on your computer (this doesn't work in the mobile app)
2. In the left sidebar, hover over the calendar you want to share
3. Click the three-dot menu that appears and select Settings and sharing
4. Scroll down to Share with specific people or groups
5. Click Add people and groups
6. Enter the person's email address
7. In the permissions dropdown, select See only free/busy (hide details)
8. Click Send

The person will get an email invitation. Once they accept, your calendar appears in theirs — but every event shows as "Busy" with no other information.

What they'll see

When someone has free/busy access to your calendar, events appear as gray blocks labeled "Busy." They can see the duration and timing, but the event title, location, description, and any attachments are hidden. If an event is marked as "free" in your settings, it won't show up as busy on their view.

This works well for:

• Sharing your work availability with a partner or family member
• Letting a house cleaner or contractor know when you'll be home
• Giving a tutor or babysitter a sense of your family's weekly rhythm

The "separate calendar" approach

Free/busy is useful, but it only solves one problem. What if you don't want to share your personal calendar at all — you just want to share a specific schedule, like your kid's sports games or a family member's class schedule?

For that, the cleanest approach is to create a second Google Calendar specifically for shared events.

How to create a separate shared calendar

1. In Google Calendar, click the + next to "Other calendars" in the left sidebar
2. Select Create new calendar
3. Give it a name (e.g., "Tyler's Soccer Schedule")
4. Click Create calendar
5. Add only the events you want to share to this calendar (not your main calendar)
6. Share it with whoever needs it using the steps above, with whatever permission level makes sense

The people you share with see only what's on that calendar — nothing from your main calendar touches it.

The downside: you have to manually create every event in that separate calendar. If the schedule comes from a coach or a school, you're retyping it from a text message or screenshot.

Sharing a specific schedule without any of your personal calendar

If what you really want to share is a schedule that comes from somewhere else — a sports league, a school, a club — there's a faster way that doesn't involve your Google Calendar at all.

CalHelper lets you upload a schedule (photo, PDF, or text) and creates a shareable calendar link from it. The people you share it with subscribe to that link in their own calendar app. They see the schedule events and nothing about your personal calendar.

How it works

1. Upload your schedule source to CalHelper — a photo of the paper schedule the coach handed out, a PDF from the school website, a text with game times
2. AI extracts the events automatically
3. You get a public calendar link (an iCal feed URL)
4. Share that link with parents, grandparents, babysitters — whoever needs it
5. They subscribe to it in Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook

Your personal Google Calendar never enters the picture. There's nothing to share permissions on, no risk of someone seeing an event they shouldn't, and no manual event entry if the schedule changes — you just update the feed.

This approach is popular with families who want grandparents and other caregivers to have the kids' activity schedule without getting access to the family's full calendar.

Which approach is right for you?

If you're sharing your own availability for scheduling purposes, the free/busy setting is exactly what you need. If you're distributing a schedule that came from a coach, school, or organization, creating a CalHelper feed is faster and keeps your personal calendar completely separate.

Try CalHelper free →