Why are some of my courses missing from the Canvas calendar?

Canvas limits how many course calendars can be displayed at once. If you are enrolled in a lot of courses, some are unchecked in the calendar sidebar and their assignments will not appear until you select them.

Why does an assignment exist in Canvas but not on the calendar?

The Canvas calendar only places items that have a due date. An assignment with no due date is real and still graded, but it never appears on the calendar. Check the assignments list, where undated work is grouped separately.

Why is a deadline my professor announced not in Canvas at all?

Only work the instructor created as a Canvas assignment, quiz or calendar event becomes a calendar item. A deadline mentioned in a syllabus PDF, a module page, an announcement or in class is not a Canvas object, so no calendar setting will surface it.

Canvas calendar not showing assignments

Last reviewed: July 24, 2026

There are six common reasons an assignment does not appear on your Canvas calendar. Five are settings you can fix in a couple of minutes. The sixth is not a bug at all, and it is the one that catches people out, so it is worth reading to the end even if an earlier fix works.

1. The course calendar is unchecked

This is the most common cause. Canvas limits how many course calendars it will display at the same time, so if you are enrolled in a lot of courses, some are simply switched off.

Open Calendar from the global navigation on the left. In the sidebar you will see a list of your courses, each with a coloured checkbox. Any course that is unchecked contributes nothing to the view. Check the missing course and its assignments should appear immediately. If you cannot check it because you have hit the limit, uncheck a course you are not worried about first.

2. The assignment has no due date

The calendar is built from due dates. An assignment with no due date set is still a real, gradeable assignment, but there is no day for Canvas to put it on, so it will never show up no matter what you toggle.

To find these, go to the course and open Assignments. Undated work is grouped on its own, usually at the bottom. It is worth scanning that group at the start of a term, because it is where long-running work such as participation grades and final projects often sits.

3. You are looking at the wrong date range

The calendar opens on the current month. If the assignment is due next month, it is there, just not on screen. The Agenda view is more reliable for this, because it lists items forward in time from today rather than showing a fixed grid.

4. The course is unpublished or outside its dates

A course that the instructor has not published yet does not appear to students, and neither does its work. The same applies to a course whose term has ended or has not started. If a course has vanished entirely rather than just its assignments, this is usually why, and only the instructor can change it.

5. You are reading a stale exported copy

If you subscribed to your Canvas calendar from Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook, you are not looking at Canvas. You are looking at a cached copy that the other app refreshes on its own schedule, and those schedules are not immediate. A newly added assignment can take a long time to appear.

Check the calendar inside Canvas itself before concluding an assignment is missing. If Canvas has it and your other calendar does not, the fix is a refresh problem, not a Canvas problem.

6. It was never a Canvas assignment

This is the one no setting fixes. The Canvas calendar can only show things that exist in Canvas as an assignment, quiz or calendar event. A great deal of real coursework never becomes one of those.

Deadlines that routinely live outside Canvas objects include:

A schedule of readings and dates inside a syllabus PDF, which Canvas treats as a file, not a set of deadlines
Dates written in a module description, a page, or a weekly overview
An announcement changing a date after the fact
Anything said out loud in class or in a lab section

If your professor put the whole term on page four of a PDF, your calendar is not broken. The information was never given to it. The only fixes are to read the syllabus and enter those dates yourself, or to use something that reads the syllabus for you.

Still missing after all six?

Message your instructor and ask directly whether the item was set up with a due date. Instructors frequently create work without one without realising that it removes the item from every student calendar. This is a two-line email that resolves it faster than any amount of clicking, and it fixes it for everyone else in the course too.