Why Does Google Calendar Decline Events Automatically?
If you use Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) for business, Google Calendar includes an “Out of Office” feature. When you set your status to Out of Office, the calendar automatically declines any new meeting invitations scheduled during that period and sends an automated rejection email to the organizer.
While this is generally helpful, it can be problematic if you still want to passively receive invitations to optional meetings, company-wide broadcasts, or events you might attend remotely while traveling. If you prefer to manually review and decline invitations, you can disable the auto-decline function.
How to Stop the Out of Office Auto-Decline Feature
You can turn off this behaviour when creating or editing an Out of Office entry.
- Open Google Calendar in your web browser.
- Click on the Out of Office block you have already created on your calendar (or click on an empty time slot to create a new one).
- If you are creating a new one, ensure you select Out of office as the event type at the top of the pop-up box.
- Look in the middle of the pop-up window for the section labelled Automatically decline meetings.
- Click on the dropdown menu in this section.
- By default, it is set to “New and existing meetings.” Change this selection by clicking Do not automatically decline.
- Click the blue Save button.
From this point forward, your calendar will still visually display that you are Out of Office, letting your colleagues know you are away, but any invitations sent to you will remain in your inbox as “Pending” until you manually click Accept, Tentative, or Decline.