If you are here because the notification you were relying on didn't arrive, you are not alone and you have not misconfigured anything obvious. This has been reported continuously for years, across Android and iPhone, and it is still unresolved.
This is a long-standing problem, not a new bug
A Reddit thread in r/GooglePixel puts it plainly: someone with every relevant setting enabled reports getting a Time to Leave notification maybe once every few months, at most, and asks whether the feature even works. It has more than ten replies and people are still adding to it. A related thread was still collecting answers as recently as February 2026, and r/google has its own "Calendar notification & time to leave help" post from August 2025.
The Google Calendar Help community has threads on it going back years — including one from March 2024 about the notification that tells you when to leave, and one from February 2025 from someone receiving Time to Leave alerts for events that weren't even theirs.
It is not confined to Android. Apple's own discussion forums have long threads about the "Time to Leave" alert option vanishing from the alert menu, working on an iPad but not the iPhone the person actually carries, and reverting to "Alert: None" after being set. See our companion guide on Apple Calendar Time to Leave not working.
And it has happened at scale before. In 2018, departure-time notifications stopped appearing for large numbers of users at once. The support thread ran for months, no fix emerged, and the workaround people settled on involved loading the desktop calendar interface in a mobile browser so that notifications came from Chrome instead of the Google app.
What actually has to be true for it to fire
Four conditions, and all of them must hold:
- The event needs a real address. Not "the office", not a room name — a full street address with number, street and city. A location Google can't resolve to a point on a map produces no departure estimate and therefore no notification.
- Location permission must be set to always, not while using the app. This is the single most common cause. If the app can only see your location while it is open, it cannot work out where you are leaving from at the moment the alert is due.
- Background activity must be allowed. Battery optimisation and app-sleep settings will quietly stop the check from running. The notification does not fail loudly — it simply never arrives.
- On iPhone, precise location must be enabled for the calendar in Privacy and Location Services. Approximate location is not enough to compute a drive. Apple documents this under Location Services and Precise Location.
What to check, in order
- Open the event and confirm the location is a full address. Pick it from the suggestions rather than typing it freehand, so it resolves to a mapped point.
- Set location permission to "Allow all the time" for your calendar and maps apps.
- Exclude those apps from battery optimisation on Android, or turn off Low Power Mode restrictions on iPhone.
- On iPhone, turn on Precise Location for the calendar under Privacy and Location Services.
- Check the alert is actually saved. Several people report setting "Time to Leave", reopening the event, and finding it has reverted to no alert. Save, reopen, and confirm it stuck.
- Test with a near-future event. Create one starting in about 30 minutes at an address roughly 20 minutes away. If nothing arrives, the settings are not the problem.
The Chrome workaround
If you want the notification without waiting for a fix, there is an approach people have used for years: open the desktop version of Google Calendar in your phone's browser and enable the time-to-leave notification there. The alert then comes from the browser rather than the calendar app.
It works. It is also fragile, it depends on the browser staying open, and it is a strange thing to have to do to be told when to leave the house.
Why it may never work reliably for you
Underneath the settings, this feature is doing something genuinely hard: watching your calendar, resolving a location, checking live traffic, estimating a drive from wherever you currently are, and firing at exactly the right moment — all in the background, on a phone that is aggressively trying to stop background work to save battery.
Every layer is a place it can silently fail. And because it fails silently, you only discover it didn't work when you are already late. That is the part people find hardest: not that it's broken, but that you cannot tell whether it is working until it has already cost you.
Waze can sync your calendar and send Time to Leave reminders — but it also requires a full street address on the event and location permission set to always-on, so it inherits the same fragility.
What to use instead
If the trip that matters is one you make regularly, the fix is to stop depending on a general-purpose calendar to work it out each time.
BoardSpy Calendar Alarms connects to your Google Calendar with read access — it never edits the calendar. Where an event has a location, it calculates the drive from your saved commute origin, adds live traffic and a buffer, and sets a leave-by alert rather than depending on a fragile system notification. Meetings without a place, including video calls, get a meeting alarm before they start. Per-meeting control is in the app.
Available on iOS and Android. More on the homepage Calendar Alarms section, and a head-to-head at BoardSpy vs Google Calendar Time to Leave.
The difference is the alarm. A notification competes with every other notification on your phone and can be suppressed by a dozen system settings. An alarm is designed to interrupt you.
If you also want a departure time for a drive that isn't in your calendar, the departure time calculator will work one out from your arrival time, and the best time to leave guides cover rush-hour windows by city. If the problem is that Google never blocked the journey in the first place, see how to add travel time to Google Calendar.
Frequently asked questions
Why is Google Calendar's Time to Leave notification not working?
Most often because the event lacks a full street address, location permission is set to "while using the app" rather than always, or battery optimisation is preventing the background check from running. Beyond those, many people report the notification arriving only intermittently even with everything configured correctly — a problem reported consistently across Android and iPhone for several years.
How do I enable Time to Leave on Google Calendar?
Add a full street address to the event, picking it from the suggested results, then set location permission for your calendar and maps apps to "Allow all the time" and exclude them from battery optimisation. On iPhone, also enable Precise Location for the calendar in Privacy and Location Services.
Why do I get Time to Leave alerts for events that aren't mine?
This has been reported on the Google Calendar Help community. It usually involves shared or subscribed calendars where events carrying a location are treated the same as your own. Unsubscribing from the shared calendar, or removing its notification permissions, is the usual remedy.
Does Waze have a time to leave feature?
Yes. Waze can connect to your calendar and send Time to Leave notifications based on real-time traffic and expected drive time. It requires a full address on the event — street name, house number and city — and location permission set to allow all the time.
Is there a calendar app that actually alarms when it's time to leave?
BoardSpy Calendar Alarms connects to Google Calendar with read-only access. Events with a real address get a leave-by alert from your saved commute origin plus live traffic. Meetings without a place, including video calls, get a meeting alarm before they start. You can turn individual meetings on or off. Download: https://boardspy.site/apps/ — homepage: https://boardspy.site/#calendar-alarms — compare: https://boardspy.site/compare/boardspy-vs-google-calendar-time-to-leave/.
Why does Time to Leave work on my iPad but not my iPhone?
This specific mismatch is widely reported on Apple's discussion forums. It generally comes down to per-device location and notification permissions rather than anything in the calendar itself — check Precise Location and notification settings on the iPhone specifically, since they are configured separately on each device.