How to Share an iCal Calendar (a Link Anyone Can Subscribe To)

The reliable way to share an iCal calendar is to hand someone a subscribe link, not a one-time export. Every calendar app — Google, Apple, Outlook — can publish a calendar as an iCal/ICS URL. Give that URL to someone and they subscribe once; from then on the calendar shows up in their own app and updates on its own whenever you change something. This guide covers how to get that link out of each app, why subscribing beats forwarding invites, and how to share several calendars as a single link when one isn't enough.

Step 1: Get the iCal link out of your calendar

"Sharing an iCal calendar" really means sharing the ICS URL your app publishes for it. Where that link lives depends on the app:

• Google Calendar (desktop): open the calendar's Settings → Integrate calendar. Use the Secret address in iCal format to share a private calendar, or make the calendar public and use the public address. Sharing links only appear on the web, not in the mobile app.
• Apple iCloud / Calendar: right-click the calendar → Share Calendar → turn on Public Calendar, then copy the link. It starts with webcal:// — that's just a subscribe URL; swap it for https:// if a tool won't accept webcal.
• Outlook / Microsoft 365: Settings → Calendar → Shared calendars, publish the calendar, and copy the ICS link (not the HTML one).

If ICS links are new to you, the iCal feed explainer walks through exactly where each app hides them.

Step 2: Send the link (and why that beats forwarding invites)

Once you have the ICS URL, you can email or message it to whoever needs the calendar. They add it in their own app — Add calendar → From URL in Google, File → New Calendar Subscription in Apple, Add calendar → Subscribe from web in Outlook — and it lands as a calendar they can toggle on and off.

This is why a subscribe link beats forwarding individual invites. A forwarded invite is a snapshot: it captures one event at one moment, and if the time moves or you add three more events, everyone you forwarded is now out of date and you have to send again. A subscribed calendar stays current on its own — you update once in your app, and everyone who subscribed sees the change without you lifting a finger.

Step 3: Share several calendars as one link

One ICS link shares one calendar. But often the thing you actually want to share is everything at once — the family's schedule, or a work calendar plus a couple of team feeds — as a single link people subscribe to just once. That's what iCal Merge is for: paste each calendar's ICS link in as a source, and it publishes one combined feed. Each event keeps its source name as a label, so subscribers can tell where every item came from.

The merged feed's public URL is the share mechanism: copy it from the calendar's page and send it to anyone. They subscribe once and get every source in one view, still auto-updating.

What sharing a feed won't do

Be clear about the boundary so it works the way you expect. A shared iCal link is read-only: subscribers can see your events, but they can't edit them, and their changes never flow back to you. iCal Merge is a merge, not a two-way sync — it reads each source and republishes one combined feed; it never writes to your original calendars. If you need other people to add and edit events in the same calendar, share it directly inside Google or Outlook with edit permission instead, or use a dedicated two-way sync tool. For simply letting people follow a calendar, a subscribe link is exactly right.