Many BalloonsHow to see birthdays in the iPhone Calendar
Updated 2026-10-28
Your iPhone can show birthdays in the Calendar app without any extra app at all. Two things have to be true first, and if either is missing the calendar looks empty and people assume the feature doesn't exist.
Turn the calendar on
The Birthdays calendar ships with iOS but is not always visible:
- Open the Calendar app.
- Tap Calendars at the bottom of the screen.
- Find Birthdays in the list and make sure it is ticked.
- Tap Done.
Birthdays now appear as all-day entries at the top of the day, in every view.
Where the dates come from
This is the part that catches people out. The Birthdays calendar holds no data. It is generated from the birthday field on your contact cards — nothing else. If a contact has no birthday saved, that person cannot appear, no matter how well you know them.
To add one: open Contacts, choose the person, tap Edit, tap add birthday, set the date, then tap Done. The next time you open Calendar it is there.
If you do not know the year, you can still save the day and month; iOS handles a birthday with no year and simply won’t show an age.
Setting when the alert arrives
A birthday on the calendar is not a reminder. By default most people get no alert at all, because birthday alerts have their own setting, separate from the alerts on your normal events:
- Open Settings, then Apps › Calendar (on older versions of iOS, just Calendar).
- Tap Default Alert Times.
- Tap Birthdays.
- Choose when you want to hear about it — on the day, the day before, two days before, or a week before.
One choice applies to every birthday. That is the limit of it.
What the built-in calendar cannot do
For a lot of people the steps above are enough, and there is no reason to add anything else. It is worth knowing where it stops:
- One alert, one timing, for everyone. You cannot be told a week ahead about your mother and on the morning about a colleague.
- No extra notice for the big ones. A 30th or a first birthday arrives exactly like any other day.
- Everyone or nobody. It shows every contact who has a birthday saved. If you imported a few thousand contacts from an old email account, your calendar now has a few thousand birthdays in it, and the ones that matter are buried.
- No monthly view of what is coming. You find out by scrolling.
- Nothing to send. You get the date and then start from a blank message.
If you want more than that
Many Balloons sits on top of the same dates and fixes the parts above: you swipe to choose who is actually on your list, you get a heads-up several days early as well as on the morning, big birthdays get extra notice, and there is a roundup at the start of each month.
It can also write the birthdays back into Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, or both, so the dates still show up in the calendar you already check — the difference being that you no longer depend on noticing them there.
Common questions
Why is my iPhone Birthdays calendar empty?
Because none of your contacts has a birthday saved, or very few do. The Birthdays calendar has no dates of its own — it is generated from the birthday field on each contact card, so it can only show what Contacts already knows.
Can I edit a birthday from the Calendar app?
No. Tapping a birthday opens the contact. The date is stored on the contact card, and that is the only place it can be changed.
Does the Birthdays calendar send a notification?
Only if you have set a default alert for birthdays, and that setting is separate from your other calendar alerts. See the section below.
Try it
Show in Calendar is part of Many Balloons, a birthday reminder app for iPhone. It is free to start, there are no ads, and the people you import stay on your phone.