Restaurant hours on Google: getting them right everywhere a diner looks
Wrong hours are the most avoidable way to lose a guest. Someone drives over because Google said you were open, finds the door locked, and does not come back. Hours are a five-minute job that has to be done every time anything changes — on Google, on every other listing, and on your own site.
Regular hours, and the other hours most restaurants leave blank
Your regular hours in Google Business Profile are the hours most diners will see on Search and Maps, and the hours voice assistants read out when someone asks whether you are open. Set them to the hours a guest can actually walk in and be served, not the hours staff are in the building.
Google Business Profile also supports additional hour types for restaurants, such as breakfast, brunch, happy hour, kitchen, takeout and delivery. These matter when they differ from your main hours. If the kitchen closes an hour before the bar, or takeout starts later than dine-in, say so. A guest who arrives at 9:30 for dinner because “open until 11” really meant “bar only after 9” is a bad review waiting to be written.
If you share a building or a host stand with another concept, make sure each profile shows its own hours rather than the building’s.
Special hours: set them before the day, not on it
Special hours override your regular hours for specific dates only — a holiday, a private event, a staff day, a snow closure. Add them in your Business Profile ahead of time; your regular hours come back automatically when the date passes.
Many diners plan holiday meals days in advance, so updating hours the morning of the holiday is too late for a lot of them. A simple habit: at the start of each month, look at the calendar for the next six weeks and enter special hours for every date that is not a normal service day. Google often prompts businesses to confirm hours around major holidays; answer those prompts rather than dismissing them.
Pre-holiday checklist
- Special hours entered on Google Business Profile for every affected date
- The same hours on Apple Maps (Apple Business Connect), Bing Places and Yelp
- Delivery and reservation platforms paused or adjusted for closed dates
- Your website’s hours block and structured data updated
- Phone greeting and any pinned social post saying the same thing
Temporarily closed is not permanently closed
For a renovation, a seasonal break or any closure with a reopening planned, use temporarily closed. It keeps your listing, reviews and photos in place and tells diners you are coming back. Permanently closed is for a restaurant that has shut for good.
When you reopen, switch the status back, confirm your hours, and post a photo or update so the profile shows recent activity. Then check the other platforms: a closure you remembered to mark on Google but not on Apple Maps or Yelp sends some diners to a dark dining room weeks after you reopened.
Why your hours sometimes change without you
Google accepts suggested edits from the public and from other sources and may apply them to your profile. If your listing shows hours you never entered, sign in, review the updates, and correct them.
The best defense is consistency. When your website, Google, Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp and your delivery partners all show the same hours, there is less conflicting information for anyone’s systems to pick from — and AI assistants answering “is it open now?” have one clear answer to repeat. The Google Maps guide covers the rest of the profile, and the AI search guide explains why consistent facts across sources matter more every year.
Hours in structured data
On your own site, show hours as plain text near the top of the page and mark them up with the openingHoursSpecification property on your Restaurant schema. Keep the visible hours and the structured data identical.
Each entry lists the days it covers with opens and closes times. For a holiday or other one-off date, add an entry with validFrom and validThrough set to that date. To show a closed day, the schema.org convention is to set both opens and closes to 00:00. Never publish hours only inside an image or a PDF menu: neither search engines nor assistants read those reliably.
Restaurant hours questions
How do I set holiday hours for my restaurant on Google?
In your Google Business Profile, open the hours section and add special hours for the specific date, either with the hours you will be open or marked as closed. Add them a week or more ahead so diners planning around the holiday see the right information. Special hours apply only to the dates you choose, and your regular hours return automatically afterwards.
Should I mark my restaurant temporarily closed or permanently closed during a renovation?
Temporarily closed. That setting tells Google and diners you will reopen and keeps the listing, its reviews and its photos intact. Permanently closed is meant for a business that has shut for good, and using it for a short closure risks the listing being treated as gone. When you reopen, switch the status back to open and confirm your hours.
Why do my restaurant hours on Google keep changing?
Google accepts suggested edits from the public and from other data sources, and may apply them to your profile. If hours change without you doing anything, sign in to your Business Profile, review any pending or applied updates, correct them, and check the profile regularly. Keeping identical hours on your website and other listings gives Google consistent information to rely on.
How do I show opening hours in structured data on my restaurant website?
Use the openingHoursSpecification property on your Restaurant schema, with one entry per set of days giving opens and closes times. For holidays and other one-off dates, add entries with validFrom and validThrough set to that date. To show a closed day, schema.org's convention is to set both opens and closes to 00:00. Keep the structured data and the visible hours on the page identical.
Five minutes, every time anything changes
Hours are not hard. They are just easy to forget on a busy week. If you would like someone to check your hours and listings across Google, Apple Maps, Bing and Yelp, call and we will walk through it with you.
Related reading
- The complete restaurant SEO guide — the overview this sits inside.
- Google Maps visibility — the rest of the profile, field by field.
- Reviews and ratings — what to do when wrong hours already produced a bad review.
- Restaurant menu SEO — menus and hours as readable text rather than images.