Business hours and calendars
Make SLA due dates count only working time, give teams their own calendars and holidays, and hold the clock on a ticket.
Settings → Workspace, Settings → SLA policies
By default an SLA target of 8 hours means 8 hours on the wall clock, nights and weekends included. Business hours make due dates count only working time: the hours your team is on, minus weekends and holidays. You can set one schedule for the whole workspace and add named calendars for teams or regions that keep different hours.
Before you start
- SLA due dates are only calculated on plans that include SLA Management. Without it, tickets get no due dates, so the settings on this page have no effect.
- Owners and Admins can change the workspace schedule and holidays. Named calendars and SLA policies need permission to manage SLAs, which Owners and Admins have by default.
Set the workspace business hours
- Open Settings and choose Workspace.
- Scroll to Business hours and turn on Use business hours for SLA.
- Pick the Timezone the schedule is kept in.
- Choose the Work days (Sun to Sat).
- Set the Hours: a start and an end time, in 15-minute steps. The start must be before the end.
- Save. You will see Business hours saved.
One start and end time applies to every working day. You cannot give Friday shorter hours than Monday, for example. The schedule is off by default, so until you turn it on, due dates count plain calendar time.
Add holidays
Under Holiday calendar on the same page, pick a date, give it a name (for example "Independence Day") and choose Add. The SLA clock treats that date as a non-working day, on top of the weekly schedule. Choose the trash icon on a row to remove it.
- Each holiday is one date. There is no repeating holiday, so add next year's dates when you know them.
- Adding a date that is already listed just renames it.
- Workspace holidays only count while Use business hours for SLA is on.
Named calendars for teams and regions
When some teams work different hours, give them their own calendar. Open Settings → SLA policies and find the Business-hours calendars card.
- Choose New calendar.
- Enter a Name (for example "EU support") and a Time zone.
- Turn on the working days and set when the day starts and ends.
- Under Holidays, enter one date per line, like 2026-12-25. A calendar can hold up to 200 holiday dates. These are separate from the workspace holiday list.
- Choose Save calendar.
A named calendar always applies when it is the one in effect, even if the workspace business-hours switch is off. Deleting a calendar sends the projects and policies that used it back to the workspace hours for new due dates.
Give a project or an SLA policy its own calendar
- A project: on the Business-hours calendars card, under Which calendar each project uses, pick a calendar beside the project, or Organization's hours. The choice saves at once. This list appears once you have at least one calendar.
- An SLA policy: targets set for a single requester or for VIPs (your workspace may call requesters customers or employees) have a Calendar field. Leave it on Project / organization hours to follow the project.
When a due date is worked out, the first of these that is set wins:
- The calendar on the SLA policy that matched the ticket.
- The calendar of the ticket's project.
- The workspace business hours and holidays, or plain calendar time if they are switched off.
How due dates skip non-working time
Everything is worked out in the calendar's time zone, with daylight-saving changes taken into account. A ticket raised outside working hours starts counting at the start of the next working day. Minutes are used up only between the start and end times, carrying over from one working day to the next and skipping days that are not work days or are holidays.
Due dates are set when a ticket is created and worked out again when its priority changes, including when an incident is declared a major incident.
Hold the SLA clock on a ticket
There are two ways to stop the clock while a ticket waits on someone else.
- A status that pauses SLAs. In Administration → Statuses, a status in a workflow can be marked Pauses SLA (for example "Waiting on Customer"). While a ticket sits in that status, its due dates stop counting down. No status pauses the clock until you mark one.
- A manual hold. In the SLA panel on a ticket, choose Hold SLA clock, add an optional reason, and choose Hold clock. The hold lasts until someone chooses Release hold; changing the status does not clear it. To release many at once, select the tickets in the list and use Release SLA hold.
When the clock starts again, each due date that has not passed moves forward by however long the clock was stopped. If both a hold and a pausing status apply, the clock stays stopped until both are lifted, and the overlap counts once. While paused, the ticket shows Paused instead of a countdown, is not counted as breached, and escalation rules skip it.