ICS file has no upcoming events

Get the file the site actually uses

Check the live source, not an export someone saved last month. Which file that is depends on how the site gets its events:

• The site imports events from another calendar (Google Calendar, Outlook, another website): the source is that calendar’s feed address, usually found under Settings, Share or Export in the other system.
• The site publishes its own calendar, for example with The Events Calendar: the source is the site’s export. Adding ?ical=1 to an events view address returns an .ics file of that view.

Download it fresh. In a terminal:

curl -sSL -D headers.txt -o feed.ics "https://example.org/events/list/?ical=1"
head -n 1 feed.ics
grep -i '^content-type' headers.txt

A real calendar file starts with BEGIN:VCALENDAR, and the server should describe it as text/calendar. If the first line is <!DOCTYPE html> you have a web page instead: a login screen, an error page or a redirect to the home page. The Events Calendar’s own troubleshooting notes list membership or login gates, firewalls, bot or user-agent blocking and its Redirect Bots setting as reasons a feed request can end up somewhere else.

If the download is empty (0 bytes), that can be an answer in itself. In our test of The Events Calendar 6.18.3.1, its ?ical=1 export returned an empty response, not an empty calendar file, whenever there were no upcoming events to list. Check the public events page: if it also shows nothing upcoming, carry on with the steps below.

If you prefer the browser, open the feed address in a private window and use “Save link as” on an export link rather than saving the page you are looking at.

Confirm the window you’re checking

Every event in an ICS file has a start in a DTSTART line. It comes in three forms:

DTSTART:20261114T193000Z                     ← UTC (the Z)
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20261114T193000   ← local time in a named zone
DTSTART:20261114T193000                      ← “floating”: no zone at all
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20261128                  ← all-day, 28 November

If every start is in the past, the file is readable but has nothing upcoming. For a rough check, count the events and look at the latest starts:

grep -c '^BEGIN:VEVENT' feed.ics
grep '^DTSTART' feed.ics | sort -t: -k2 | tail -n 5

BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Harvest Supper
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20261018T183000   ← 18 Oct 2026, already past
END:VEVENT

The ICS event checker does this properly: it counts events that are upcoming or in progress in the next 30 days, shows the next one, and reports the latest date in the file when nothing is upcoming.

Check upcoming events are published

A public export only contains events visitors are allowed to see. Drafts, events pending review, scheduled posts and private events are left out. In WordPress, open the events list in the admin, filter by status, and look for anything dated in the next month that is not marked Published.

While you are there, open one upcoming event and check:

• its start and end dates are what you expect (an end date before the start, or a typo in the year, is easy to miss);
• in The Events Calendar, whether Hide From Event Listings is ticked in the event’s options. It is designed to keep an event out of listings.

Look for a filtered or limited export

Export links usually come from the view you were on. If yours came from a category, venue or date-filtered page, it may legitimately contain nothing upcoming. Export again from the unfiltered list.

Exports are also often limited by design. The Events Calendar’s subscribe feed only includes current and future events, and its documented test address returns the next 30 events, not every event. A busy calendar can push a specific event out of a capped export.

Check the feed is still updating

If the site imports events from another calendar, the import may have stopped. Compare the newest event in the file with the newest event in the original calendar. A clean gap after a particular date usually points to an import that failed or was paused.

For imports into The Events Calendar, its documentation describes one silent failure worth checking: an incoming event whose name matches an event in Events → Ignored or Events → Trash is skipped without an error in the logs. Search both for the missing event names, then re-run the import.