Improving secondary Google calendar management with dedicated owners

What’s new?

Google is changing how secondary calendar ownership works in Google Calendar to improve data governance. A secondary calendar is any calendar you create yourself or a group calendar that’s been shared with you. Previously, these calendars could only be managed at the organization level, but now each one will have a single, dedicated owner.

When you create a new secondary calendar, you automatically become its owner. For existing secondary calendars, Google will automatically assign an owner based on the calendar’s current permissions. The important part: the calendar will inherit organizational policies from its owner, such as data region settings and assured controls. This gives admins much more granular control over how individual calendars are governed.

Why does this matter?

This change addresses a real gap in calendar management. Secondary calendars are often created for teams, projects, or shared resources, but they’ve existed in a kind of policy limbo – not clearly associated with any particular user’s organizational policies. When calendars don’t have clear ownership, it becomes difficult to apply consistent governance, especially for organizations with complex data residency or compliance requirements.

With dedicated ownership, each calendar now has a clear policy inheritance path. If your organization has different data regions configured or uses assured controls for compliance, those policies will flow from the owner to their calendars. This makes it much easier to maintain compliance across all your organization’s calendars.

Transferring ownership

The new ownership model includes the ability to transfer a secondary calendar to another user in your organization. This is particularly useful when a calendar owner changes teams or leaves the organization – you can ensure the calendar stays with the appropriate team by transferring ownership to someone else.

End users can transfer ownership directly from Calendar settings, and admins can handle transfers through the Admin console. The API has also been updated to reflect these changes, and Google has added protections to ensure only the owner can delete a calendar, and their access level can’t be downgraded while they remain the owner.

When can you use it?

This feature is rolling out now for personal Google accounts. For Workspace customers, the extended rollout begins on December 3, 2025. This will be ON by default for both admins and end users and cannot be disabled. For existing calendars, Google will automatically assign owners based on current permissions, so no immediate action is required.

For more information, check out the Google Workspace update feed

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