Why your Notion dates don't show up in Apple Calendar
Notion does not send dates to Apple Calendar on its own, so they only show up there if a feed or a sync tool puts them there. When they are missing, the cause is one of five things: nothing is connected, a feed has not refreshed, the tool is not reading your date column, the calendar is switched off on your phone, or the sync has not run yet. I go through them in the order they are quickest to check.
4 min read
Nothing is connected yet
Notion's calendar view lives inside Notion. Its help page for calendar views offers no export or subscription link for Apple Calendar. Notion's own Calendar app shows your database beside your iCloud events, but its help page says you can only view the database in Notion Calendar, not in Google or iCloud calendar.
So if you added a database to Notion Calendar and then looked in the iPhone Calendar app, the dates were never going to be there. You need a feed or a sync. How to see your Notion tasks in Apple Calendar on iPhone covers the three ways to get one.
A feed has not refreshed
A feed is a link that Apple Calendar subscribes to and re-reads on its own schedule. The events in it are not stored in your iCloud account, so they appear only after the next read. Notion to Calendar says on its site that Apple Calendar decides when to check, and that its free plan caches the source for six hours. A task you added this morning can be missing this afternoon, and nothing is wrong.
The same page says that on a Mac you can set an auto-refresh interval on the subscription or refresh it by hand. A feed is also read-only, so an event you move on your phone changes nothing in Notion.
A sync that writes real events works differently. Calnio puts each event into your iCloud calendar over CalDAV, so the event lives in iCloud like one you made yourself, and it appears as soon as Calnio has written it.
The tool is not reading your date column
A page with an empty date has nothing to show, and a date typed into a text column is not a date. The column has to be of the Date type. Notion says a database needs a Date property for its calendar view, and Calnio reads the same kind of column.
If a database has one date column, Calnio uses it. If it has several, Calnio picks the one named Due date, Due, Deadline, Date, When or Start date. When none of those names match, the sync waits until you choose a column on its card in Calnio, and no events appear until you do.
The database also has to be shared with the tool. In Notion you tick the pages Calnio may see, and Calnio sees nothing you did not tick.
The calendar is switched off on your phone
A new calendar can arrive on your iPhone unticked. Open Calendar, tap Calendars at the bottom, and tick the new calendar under iCloud. If your other iCloud calendars already show up on the phone, iCloud Calendar itself is working.
The sync has not run yet, or it failed
Calnio runs the first sync right after you tick a database, and that usually takes seconds. After that it checks every 30 minutes on the free plan, every 15 by default on the paid plan and as often as every 5 if you choose, so a page you add now can take a few minutes to appear.
If it still does not show, open Calnio and look at that sync's card. A failed run says what broke. One cause is Apple refusing the app-specific password. That happens after you change your Apple Account password, because Apple revokes every app-specific password when you do. How to create an iCloud app-specific password has the steps to make a new one.
A page whose date you clear, or that you move to the Notion trash, loses its event on the next check. That is by design, and it can look like a missing date if you cleared the column by accident.