How availability and schedules work

Your schedule is the outer boundary of when you are bookable. Everything else — your calendar, your existing bookings, the event type's limits — can only take time away from it, never add time to it. Understanding that order explains almost every surprising result on a booking page.

The weekly schedule

Open Scheduling → Availability. You get one row per weekday: a checkbox and one or more time windows. Unchecked means unavailable, all day. New accounts start as Monday to Friday, 9:00–17:00.

A day can have several windows. Click Add window to split a day — say 9:00–12:00 and 15:00–17:00, with the middle closed — and the small × to remove a window. Windows on the same day may sit back to back but not overlap; the editor flags overlaps before saving, and the server rejects them too.

Timezones

The timezone selector at the top of the availability page applies to the whole schedule. Your hours are stored as wall-clock time in that zone, not as a fixed offset. 9:00 means 9:00 where you are, in summer and in winter alike — when your region changes clocks, your booking page follows you automatically. You do not need to shift your hours twice a year.

Invitees never see your timezone unless you tell them. The booking page detects the visitor's own timezone from their browser and renders every slot in it, so a 9:00 London slot shows as 4:00am to someone in New York — which is exactly why the next section matters.

Daylight saving

Because hours are wall-clock, daylight-saving transitions are handled for you. On a spring-forward day the hour that does not exist simply produces no slots; on a fall-back day the repeated hour is resolved to a single real instant rather than being offered twice. The engine has a regression test suite covering both transitions in northern- and southern-hemisphere zones.

How a slot is decided

For every candidate start time, in this order:

1. Is it inside a schedule window? The whole meeting, plus any buffers, must fit before the window closes.
2. Is it far enough away?Slots earlier than now plus the event type's minimum notice are dropped.
3. Is it inside the booking window?Slots beyond the event type's bookable-days-ahead limit are dropped.
4. Are you free? Busy blocks from every conflict-checked calendar, plus your existing Neos Meet bookings, are subtracted — including the buffer padding either side.

If a calendar cannot be checked — none connected, or the grant has been revoked — the answer to step 4 is unknowable, and the engine offers nothing rather than risk double-booking you. That behaviour is covered in My invitees see no available times.

Blocking specific dates

Date overrides live on the same page, under your weekly hours. An override applies to one calendar date and replaces the weekly schedule for that date. It comes in two forms:

• Unavailable all day — the date is blocked entirely, whatever the weekly schedule says. Use it for holidays and days off.
• Custom hours — a single start–end window replaces your normal hours for that date. One window per date; if you need a split day just once, put a busy block on your connected calendar over the gap instead.

Each date holds at most one override — adding another for the same date replaces it — and removing an override returns the date to your weekly hours. Busy times from your connected calendars are still subtracted on top, and past overrides simply expire; the list only shows upcoming ones.

Team schedules

On a team link, every host uses their own availability schedule and their own calendars. There is no separate team schedule to maintain — you each set your hours once, and the shared link pools them. See Team links and round-robin for how the pooling works.

Checking your work

The most reliable test is to open your own booking link in a private window, as an invitee would. That view applies every rule above and shows exactly what someone else sees. The AI setup assistant also renders a preview week from a draft configuration if you want to try a change before saving it.

Still stuck?

Email support@neos.network with your booking link and, if there is one, the exact time an invitee tried to book. A real person reads it — there is no bot in front of us.