How to Configure Business Hours and Holidays in Freshservice?

Quick Summary

Configuring business hours and holidays in Freshservice ensures your SLA timers run only when your team is actually available to respond. This article explains how to create business-hour schedules, add public and company holidays, link schedules to SLA policies, and manage multiple time zones for global support teams — so every ticket is measured fairly and accurately.

Freshservice is a cloud-based IT Service Management (ITSM) platform by Freshworks that centralizes incident management, change control, asset tracking, and service request fulfillment in one place. To learn more about the full feature set, visit Freshservice ITSM Software.

SLA compliance is one of the most closely watched metrics in any IT department. Miss too many SLA targets and executive stakeholders start asking uncomfortable questions. Yet many teams unknowingly set themselves up to fail by leaving Freshservice running on a default 24/7 clock — counting SLA time through weekends, public holidays, and the middle of the night even when no agent is available to act.

The solution is straightforward: configure business hours and holiday lists inside Freshservice so that SLA timers pause automatically whenever your team is off the clock. This article reveals exactly how to set up those schedules, attach them to your SLA policies, and handle the added complexity that comes with multi-region or follow-the-sun support teams.

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Why Does Configuring Business Hours Matter for SLA Accuracy in Freshservice?

SLA policies in Freshservice define how quickly agents must respond to and resolve tickets at each priority level. By default, Freshservice measures that time continuously — every hour counts, including hours when your help desk is closed. Without a business-hours schedule, a P2 ticket that arrives at 5 pm on a Friday starts burning SLA time immediately, even though no agent will see it until Monday morning.

Linking SLA policies to a business-hours schedule fixes this. Freshservice pauses the SLA clock outside of configured working hours and resumes it the moment the next business day begins. As a result, your SLA reports reflect genuine agent performance rather than penalizing the team for hours they were never staffed to cover.

What Happens to SLA Timers on Holidays Without a Holiday List?

Even with a business-hours schedule in place, Freshservice continues counting SLA time on public holidays unless you explicitly add a holiday list and attach it to the schedule. A ticket submitted at 9 am on a bank holiday — when your office is closed — still starts its SLA timer at 9 am because Freshservice sees that time as a normal business hour. Consequently, adding a holiday list is not optional if you want accurate SLA data. It is an essential companion to the business-hours configuration.

How Do You Access Business Hours Settings in Freshservice?

All business hours and holiday configuration lives inside the Freshservice Admin panel. You need Administrator-level access to create or modify schedules. The navigation path is short and consistent:

1. Log in to Freshservice as an Administrator.
2. Click the Admin icon (gear symbol) in the left navigation sidebar.
3. Under the Helpdesk Productivity section, select Business Hours.
4. The Business Hours screen lists all existing schedules and includes a New Business Hours button in the top-right corner.

From this screen, you can create multiple independent schedules, edit existing ones, and delete schedules that are no longer in use. Furthermore, each schedule can carry its own holiday list, making it straightforward to maintain different calendars for offices in different countries.

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How Do You Create a Business Hours Schedule in Freshservice?

Creating a business-hours schedule in Freshservice takes only a few minutes. The configuration wizard walks you through every required setting in a single screen. Here is what each section covers:

What Settings Do You Configure When Building a New Schedule?

Setting	What to Configure	Example Value
Schedule Name	A descriptive label for this schedule	UK Office Hours, 24/7 Critical Support
Time Zone	The time zone this schedule operates in	Europe/London, America/New_York
Working Days	Toggle each day of the week on or off	Monday to Friday enabled; Saturday, Sunday off
Working Hours (per day)	Set start and end times for each active day	08:00 – 18:00
Custom Hours per Day	Optionally set different hours for specific days	Friday 08:00 – 16:00, Monday 09:00 – 18:00
Holiday List	Attach a pre-built holiday list to this schedule	UK Public Holidays 2025

After filling in these settings, click Save. Freshservice immediately makes the schedule available for selection in your SLA policy configuration. Notably, you can create as many schedules as you need — there is no platform limit on the number of business-hour profiles your Freshservice instance supports.

How Do You Handle Different Working Hours on Different Days?

Some organizations run shorter hours on Fridays, extended hours on Mondays, or staggered shifts that vary by day. Freshservice handles this through per-day hour overrides. When you enable a working day in the schedule, a start-time and end-time selector appears for that specific day. Simply set different times for each day that runs on a non-standard schedule. This flexibility means you never need to round your actual working hours up or down to fit a rigid template — Freshservice matches whatever pattern your team actually works.

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How Do You Create and Manage Holiday Lists in Freshservice?

Holiday lists in Freshservice are separate objects that you create once and then attach to one or more business-hours schedules. This separation is deliberate: if your London office and your Dublin office share the same working hours but observe different public holidays, you create one schedule and two holiday lists, then clone the schedule and attach the correct list to each version.

What Steps Do You Follow to Build a Holiday List?

• In the Admin panel, navigate to Business Hours.
• Click the Holiday List tab at the top of the screen.
• Click New Holiday List and give it a descriptive name (e.g., “Germany Public Holidays 2025”).
• Click Add Holiday for each date you want to include.
• Enter the holiday name (e.g., “Christmas Day”) and select the date from the date picker.
• Repeat for every holiday your team observes that year.
• Click Save to store the list.

Once saved, the holiday list appears in the dropdown inside any business-hours schedule configuration. Additionally, Freshservice lets you update a holiday list at any point during the year — for example, when a government announces an unplanned public holiday at short notice. Changes apply immediately to all schedules that use that list.

What Types of Holidays Should You Include in a Freshservice Holiday List?

Holiday Category	Examples	Include in List?
National Public Holidays	Christmas, New Year’s Day, Independence Day	Yes — always
Regional Holidays	State bank holidays, provincial observances	Yes — if your office location observes them
Company Holidays	Office closure days, company anniversary, summer shutdown	Yes — add as named custom entries
Half-Day Closures	Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve early closure	Partial — adjust working hours for that day instead
Floating Holidays	Employee personal holidays, optional observance days	No — these vary per person and are not suitable for a shared schedule

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How Do You Link Business Hours Schedules to SLA Policies in Freshservice?

Creating a business-hours schedule does nothing on its own — you need to attach it to an SLA policy before Freshservice starts using it to govern ticket timers. SLA policies live in a different section of the Admin panel, but the connection between the two is a single dropdown field.

1. In the Admin panel, go to Service Management > SLA Policies.
2. Click on the SLA policy you want to update, or create a new one.
3. Inside the SLA policy editor, locate the Business Hours field.
4. Select the business-hours schedule you want this policy to follow from the dropdown.
5. Save the SLA policy.

From that point forward, Freshservice applies the selected schedule when calculating SLA due dates for every ticket governed by that policy. For example, if your schedule runs Monday to Friday, 09:00 – 18:00, and a P1 ticket arrives at 17:45 on a Friday with a four-hour resolution SLA, Freshservice sets the due time to 09:15 on Monday morning — not 21:45 on Friday.

Can Different SLA Policies Use Different Business-Hours Schedules?

Yes — and this is one of Freshservice’s most powerful SLA configuration features. Each SLA policy independently selects its own business-hours schedule. This means your standard IT helpdesk can follow a Monday-to-Friday schedule while a separate Critical Infrastructure SLA policy follows a 24/7 schedule for high-priority production incidents. Similarly, regional SLA policies for your APAC team can reference an APAC business-hours schedule while your EMEA policies reference a separate European schedule.

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How Do You Configure Business Hours for Multi-Region and Global Support Teams?

Organizations with IT support teams across multiple time zones face a more complex configuration challenge. A single business-hours schedule works well for a single-region team, but global teams need schedules that reflect the actual hours each regional team covers. Freshservice handles this through multiple independent schedules, each tied to a specific time zone.

What Does a Multi-Region Business Hours Setup Look Like in Freshservice?

Region	Schedule Name	Time Zone	Working Hours	Holiday List
North America	NA Business Hours	America/New_York	Mon–Fri 08:00–18:00 ET	US Federal Holidays
Europe	EMEA Business Hours	Europe/London	Mon–Fri 08:00–18:00 GMT	UK + EU Public Holidays
Asia-Pacific	APAC Business Hours	Asia/Singapore	Mon–Fri 09:00–18:00 SGT	SG + AU Public Holidays
24/7 Critical	Critical P1 Hours	UTC	All days, 00:00–23:59	None (always on)

With this structure in place, each regional SLA policy points to its own schedule. Consequently, a P2 ticket assigned to the APAC team follows Singapore business hours, while the same priority ticket assigned to the NA team follows Eastern Time hours. Moreover, the 24/7 Critical schedule ensures that production-impacting P1 incidents never pause their SLA timers regardless of the day or time zone.

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How Do You Verify That Business Hours Are Working Correctly in Freshservice?

After configuring schedules and attaching them to SLA policies, it is essential to verify the setup works as intended before relying on it for real SLA measurement. Freshservice provides a straightforward way to validate your configuration.

• Create a test ticket — Submit a ticket at a time that falls outside your business hours (e.g., late Friday afternoon) and check the SLA due date Freshservice calculates. It should fall within the next working window, not a fixed number of hours from submission.
• Check the ticket’s SLA timer — Open the ticket and look at the Due By field. Freshservice displays this time based on the SLA policy and business-hours schedule attached to that ticket type and priority.
• Review the SLA policy assignment — Confirm that the ticket’s category and priority map to the correct SLA policy, which in turn references the correct business-hours schedule.
• Test around a holiday date — If you have a holiday list attached, submit a test ticket on or just before a holiday date and verify that Freshservice skips that date when calculating the SLA due time.

Furthermore, Freshservice’s SLA compliance reports in the Analytics section provide an indirect validation tool. If compliance rates improve significantly after you attach business-hours schedules to your SLA policies, it confirms the configuration is working — the team was never missing those SLAs through poor performance, but through unfair after-hours counting.

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What Are the Best Practices for Managing Business Hours in Freshservice?

A clean, well-maintained business-hours configuration keeps your SLA data trustworthy and reduces the administrative burden of annual updates. Here are the practices that experienced Freshservice administrators follow:

• Update holiday lists at the start of each year — Set a calendar reminder in January to refresh your holiday lists for the new year before any holidays occur.
• Use descriptive schedule names — Names like “UK Mon–Fri 08–18 GMT” are instantly recognizable to any administrator; generic names like “Schedule 1” create confusion during audits.
• Create one schedule per distinct working pattern — Avoid reusing a schedule across teams with slightly different hours; the small differences compound into meaningful SLA inaccuracies over time.
• Document which SLA policies use which schedules — Maintain a simple internal table mapping each SLA policy to its business-hours schedule so future administrators understand the configuration at a glance.
• Review schedules after organizational changes — When your company opens a new office, shifts working hours, or acquires a team in a different time zone, update your Freshservice schedules to match.
• Never delete a schedule attached to an active SLA policy — Freshservice will revert that policy to 24/7 counting. Instead, edit the schedule or create a new one and reattach it before removing the old entry.

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What Should You Take Away About Business Hours and Holidays in Freshservice?

Configuring business hours and holiday lists in Freshservice transforms SLA measurement from an exercise in frustration into a reliable reflection of your team’s actual performance. By telling Freshservice exactly when your team is available — down to the specific hours of each working day and every holiday your office observes — you eliminate the unfair penalty of after-hours SLA counting and give your agents a realistic target to hit.

Moreover, Freshservice‘s multi-schedule architecture makes this configuration just as practical for global enterprise teams as it is for a single-location help desk. Regional schedules, time-zone-aware SLA policies, and per-holiday-list flexibility let you build a configuration that matches the true complexity of how your support organization operates across borders and time zones.

Treat business-hours configuration as a living system rather than a one-time setup task. Review your schedules annually, update holiday lists at the start of each year, and revisit your SLA policy attachments whenever your team structure changes. A well-maintained schedule configuration in Freshservice directly translates into more accurate reporting, fairer agent performance measurement, and stronger stakeholder confidence in your SLA data. Discover the full range of ITSM tools available at Freshservice ITSM Software.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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