Why doesn't Bookings with me match my Outlook work hours?

How a personal page decides which times to show#

What we saw when testing (September 2026)#

We captured live Bookings with me pages in four time zones and the calls the page makes. Across our 13 captures of shared and personal pages, that came to 913 days and 7,924 slots, and we reproduced every slot the pages showed. On personal pages:

• The server does the availability work. Your working hours (or the meeting type's custom hours), your Outlook busy time and existing bookings arrive already combined. The page never sees your work-hours setting directly, so if the server holds stale hours, the page shows stale hours.
• Starts sit on a grid counted from midnight. With a 30-minute interval, starts land on :00 and :30 only. If your hours begin at 9:15, the first slot is 9:30.
• The meeting has to fit. A 60-minute meeting type in a 9:00 to 17:00 day has its last start at 16:00. A 30-minute busy block at 10:00 removes the 10:00 start.
• Lead time has 15 minutes added. A slot must start more than the minimum lead time plus 15 minutes from now. When a meeting type sets no lead time, the page code uses 1 hour, and it uses 90 days as the furthest date you can book ahead.
• Month boundaries can mislead you. The server's answer can depend on the date range the page asks for. Days in a later month can also look enabled when they have no slots. Clicking one does nothing, and the previous day's times stay on screen, so it looks as if that day has those times.

Buffers and start-time increments explains the grid in detail.

Check these in order#

1. Which schedule does the meeting type use? On the Bookings home page, select the meeting type tile and look at Schedule customization. Regular hours follows Outlook. Custom hours are set per weekday and ignore Outlook. Each meeting type is set separately, including the default "15 mins meeting" and "30 mins meeting", so check every public one.
2. What does Outlook actually hold? In Outlook on the web, open Settings → Calendar → Work hours and location and check the days, hours and time zone. A July 2026 Feedback Portal idea asks that Bookings with me "support Outlook 'Work hours and location'". It only has one vote, but it suggests that setting doesn't always carry through in full.
3. Whose time zone are you looking at? The page shows times in the visitor's time zone. In our captures, the same page showed different clock times in New York, London and Kolkata. A student in another country sees your 9:00 to 17:00 converted. To check your own view, open the link in a private window on a device set to your time zone, and make sure the Outlook time zone matches where you work. Wrong time zone in Bookings covers the shared-page version of this problem.
4. What is blocking the calendar? Events that show you as busy or out of office block time, and events marked Free don't. Look for recurring holds, focus blocks and travel time marked Busy. How Outlook events block Bookings availability goes through the options.
5. Lead time and maximum lead time. If mornings are missing only today and tomorrow, it's the minimum lead time. If dates stop after a certain point, it's the maximum.

When the settings are right and the hours are still wrong#

Two threads describe the same fault. In 2023 (6 "same question" votes), a university user teaching students saw a page with nothing before 10:00 and nothing at all on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The hours matched ones they had set long before and since changed, and it happened with regular and custom hours alike. In June 2026, a user with custom hours of 10:00 to 16:00 (Friday until 14:30) saw 08:00 to 17:00 on the public link, even in a private window, and even though the settings screen showed the right times. Both were told to go to their admin and Microsoft support.

While you wait for support:

• Switch the meeting type's schedule. Change a regular-hours meeting type to custom hours, or the other way round, save, then switch back if you need to. Nobody has confirmed this fixes the fault, so check the public link afterwards.
• Create a new meeting type with the right hours, make it public, and make the old one private.
• Block the wrong hours in Outlook with recurring Busy events. It's crude, but it works whatever the service thinks your work hours are.

If you need hours you can rely on, a shared booking page with yourself as the only staff member gives you staff hours, business hours and per-service availability, and you set them all in the Bookings web app rather than inheriting them.

BookingsXP is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.