Add required custom questions in Microsoft Bookings

Add a required question#

1. Open your shared booking page and go to Services. Edit a service, or select Add new service.
2. Go to the Custom fields section.
3. Select Add a question, type the question and select Save.
4. Select the question so it's highlighted. Highlighted means it's turned on for this service.
5. Tick Required if customers must answer it.
6. Select Ok, then save the service. If the page isn't published yet, go to Booking page and select Save and publish.

Customers see the built-in fields under Add your details and your own questions under Provide additional information. Staff see the answers when they open the appointment in the Calendar.

Questions are stored in one list shared by every service on the page. A question you create for one service appears, switched off, on every other service, ready to reuse. Be careful with deleting: a deleted question disappears from every service. Deselect it on the one service instead.

Hide or relax phone, address and notes#

Each built-in field has its own Required tick box on each service:

• Make it optional: untick Required. The field still shows, but customers can leave it blank.
• Stop asking it: the custom-questions guide shows phone number and notes turned off for a service by deselecting them. The service-setup guide says the four fields are "non-removable". Check the current behaviour on your own page before relying on either.

For a tenant-wide rule, a Microsoft 365 admin can go to Settings → Org settings → Bookings in the admin center and use Restrict collection of customer data. Fields ticked there "won't be included on any forms shown to your clients or customers". It's intended for compliance, for example if you don't want to store home addresses. Tenant settings can take up to four hours to apply.

Leave the email field alone#

The customer email field is required by default. Keep it that way, and don't replace it with a custom "Email" question. The Bookings FAQ explains that without the customer's email, Bookings can't deliver the confirmation or the Teams link. On the most-voted Q&A thread about missing confirmations (more than 130 "same question" votes), the fix that worked for many people was to go back to the built-in field after swapping it for a custom one. If confirmations are already missing, see customers not receiving emails.

Q&A also has a thread with the opposite goal: collecting an email address without sending confirmations. The community workaround was to turn off the built-in email field and ask for the address in a custom question. It works for that narrow case, but customers then get no confirmation, reminder or meeting link.

What we saw when testing (September 2026)#

We captured the public booking page and the calls it makes across 13 live captures and a handful of test bookings. Three things matter when you plan questions:

• Only two question types reach customers: free text and single choice (radio buttons). There's no checkbox or multi-select type on the public page, so "tick all that apply" needs one yes/no question per option, or a free-text question.
• Notes are capped at 3,000 characters by the page. Long intake answers belong in a free-text question or a form you send later.
• A tenant admin can switch fields off everywhere. The page reads tenant settings that hide phone, address, notes and custom questions on every booking page in the organization. If your questions vanish from all services at once, ask your Microsoft 365 admin before you rebuild anything.

Limits as of September 2026#

• No extra help text. There's no documented way to add a description or hint under a question. A Feedback Portal idea, "Need extra text for the Custom Fields", asks for exactly that. Put guidance in the question wording or in the service description.
• No prefill. Answers can't be passed in through the booking page URL. See prefilling the Bookings form.
• Not on Bookings with me. Microsoft doesn't document custom questions for personal booking pages, and community answers say they aren't available. In our tests, a booking from a personal page carried only name, email, notes and time zone. See custom questions on Bookings with me.
• Consent is separate. For terms or privacy consent, Microsoft recommends the Customer data usage consent checkbox on the Booking page, or a required custom question that links to your form.

For advice on how many questions to ask and how to word them, see custom questions best practices.

Doing this with BookingsXP#

The BookingsXP widget shows your service's custom questions, enforces the ones marked Required in Bookings, and can add a line of help text under each question, which the booking page Microsoft hosts can't show. Its form settings let phone and notes follow Bookings, or be optional, required or hidden on your site; anything Bookings requires stays required. Answers are written into the normal Bookings appointment. See the embed options. BookingsXP is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.