How to Add the NFL Schedule to Your Calendar (Google, Apple, Outlook)

Key dates

Season structure

The NFL regular season runs 18 weeks with each of the 32 teams playing 17 games and getting one bye week. Games are concentrated on Sunday afternoons, with the prime-time Sunday Night Football game on NBC, Monday Night Football on ESPN/ABC, and Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime.

Seven teams from each conference make the playoffs — four division winners plus three wild cards. The top seed in each conference gets a first-round bye. Playoff games are spread across three weekends in January, followed by Conference Championships and the Super Bowl.

How to subscribe

The fastest way: subscribe to your team's ESPN feed

ESPN publishes a free iCal/ICS feed for every NFL team. The feed auto-updates when game times shift (which happens often through TV-flex scheduling), so you don't have to babysit your calendar.

1. Go to espn.com/nfl/team/schedule/_/name/[team-abbr] — for example, espn.com/nfl/team/schedule/_/name/dal for the Dallas Cowboys.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the schedule, find the small "Subscribe" or calendar icon, right-click → Copy link address.
3. In Google Calendar: left sidebar → Other calendars → + → From URL → paste.
4. In Apple Calendar (Mac): File → New Calendar Subscription → paste. (iPhone: Settings → Calendar → Accounts → Add Account → Other → Add Subscribed Calendar.)
5. In Outlook: Add calendar → Subscribe from web → paste.

For the whole league

There's no single official "all-NFL" iCal feed. Two practical options:

• Subscribe to each team you care about (typically 1–4 calendars). Color-code them in Google Calendar so you can see the week at a glance.
• Community feeds like nflschedule.com aggregate the full schedule into one iCal. Verify the feed updates after Week 1 (some go stale) before trusting it.

Local time zones — the gotcha

ESPN's iCal feeds tag every event with the stadium's local time zone. When the feed says a Cowboys home game starts at 1:00 PM, that's Dallas time (CT). Google Calendar and Apple Calendar both convert this correctly to your local zone automatically — Outlook desktop sometimes does not. Check our time-zone setup guide if events appear an hour off.

Bye weeks 2026 — when your team is off

Every NFL team gets exactly one bye week. Bye weeks fall between Week 5 and Week 14. The full bye-week schedule is announced when the NFL releases the schedule in mid-May.

To find your team's bye on the ESPN iCal feed: the calendar simply skips that week. There's no "bye" event by default — you can add a manual all-day event so it's visible.

How bye weeks work: the NFL distributes byes so that no team plays more than two games on short rest (Thursday after Sunday). Teams coming off a bye historically win about 56% of their next game — useful trivia for office pools.

TNF, SNF, MNF — prime-time time slots

Three weekly prime-time NFL windows have stable start times you can pre-block in your calendar without waiting for the schedule release:

• Thursday Night Football — 8:15 PM ET on Amazon Prime Video (Sept 11, 2026 → Dec 25, 2026)
• Sunday Night Football — 8:20 PM ET on NBC / Peacock
• Monday Night Football — 8:15 PM ET on ESPN / ABC (occasional doubleheader at 7:15 + 9:30 PM ET)

The Sunday afternoon slate uses two main windows: 1:00 PM ET (early games on CBS / FOX) and 4:05 / 4:25 PM ET (late games). London / Munich international games shift to 9:30 AM ET.

How to pre-add the playoffs

Playoff times aren't confirmed until the regular season ends, but the date windows are fixed in advance. Add these as all-day "tentative" placeholders to your calendar right now:

• Wild Card weekend — Saturday Jan 9 – Monday Jan 11, 2027 (6 games)
• Divisional weekend — Saturday Jan 16 – Sunday Jan 17, 2027 (4 games)
• Conference Championships — Sunday Jan 24, 2027 (2 games, 3:05 PM and 6:40 PM ET)
• Super Bowl LXI — Sunday Feb 7, 2027 at 6:30 PM ET (SoFi Stadium, Inglewood)