I’d like to create a calendar event for a quarterly review that repeats on the last Saturday of every quarter. That is, on the last Saturday of March, June, September and December. I’ve tried two approaches, neither of which work and I just can’t seem to figure out why Calendar doesn’t create the event.
First I created a custom rule to repeat the event yearly, chose the above months and the rule “On the: last Saturday”.
For the second attempt I chose to repeat the event monthly, specifying the rule “Every 3 months” and “On the: last Saturday”.
After creating the event, Calendar shows the rule for repetition as “Custom…”, which seems to imply that the rule was accepted. But when I close and re-open the event details, the rule has changed to Never and the event of course doesn’t appear in the following quarters.
Is there an error in my thinking in that while the repetition rule makes sense to me, it can’t in fact be created in this same way with the rules the program follows?
It is quirky, at best. Using your second method I could get the repeat for the third or fourth Saturday of the month, but choosing the fifth or last didn’t want to cooperate!
Same here. This should have worked. But it did not - excatly as you have described.
Then, I did the same in BusyCal. Every 3 months and on the last Saturday. It worked - and showed up fine in Apple Calendar after that.
Looks like a bug to me. Maybe something for Apple?!
It’s not quite a workaround because I would need to evaluate each upcoming event and adjust as necessary. It would seem better then to say so explicitly by creating a repeating task event on the 25th day to schedule a review.
Thanks for the link to Apple’s feedback page. I sent the same description and feel less frustrated about the issue, which helps.
About BusyCal. Do you happen to know if it would be possible to sync only the holiday calendar from the Apple Calendar application? (I live in Finland and don’t know of a way to attach the national holiday calendar to BusyCal).
I am not sure. According to their support page, their solution is to subscribe to a public holiday calendar:
There it is also being described how to make any calendar a holiday calendar.
They also provide some curated holiday calendars on their webpage, but apparently not for Finland. I am quite sure that there also are options out there: finnish holidays calendar subscription at DuckDuckGo
I am subscribed to an individual holiday calendar (PHP script on my web server that I coded myself a few years ago). It serves holidays in my neck of the woods and also some local festivities. I am using that calendar both in BusyCal and in Apple Calendar because the Apple holiday calendar for Germany is not very helpful for me.
I noticed that the URL for the holiday calendar Apple provides is visible in the Calendar app and subscribed to it. Here is to hoping that BusyCal will work.
Which version of MacOS are you on? I am running Beta 26.4. This works for me.
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Are you using the latest iOS 26 version?
I was able to create the rule:
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So, maybe 26.4 fixes it. Let us know when/if you upgrade to 26.4 (when available to you). Cheers.
Won’t the solution above her latest post work?
I’ve got one Mac on 26.3.1 and another on 26.4 RC. I can confirm that creating this repeating event works on 26.4 and doesn’t work on 26.3.
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On my iPhone I’m running iOS 26.3.1 (a) and defining the event on the iPhone retains the repetition rule and therefore works as a workaround.
But I want an application that I can trust to work on the Mac. Unfortunately I have seen other bugs, such as events not being shown in the Year view unless the containing calendar is inactive or events are shown whether or not the calendar is active. Therefore I think that it’s best to wait for the 26.4 releases while testing BusyCal.
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