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Business hours are set per inbox, not once for the account. A sales widget and a support line on the same site can keep different hours, and usually should. Open the inbox, then the Business Hours tab.

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Turning it on

The toggle is Enable business availability for this inbox, and its help text is worth reading twice:
“Enabling business availability will show the available hours on live chat widget even if all the agents are offline. Outside available hours visitors can be warned with a message and a pre-chat form.”
Two things follow from that sentence. Your schedule overrides agent presence. With business hours on, the widget shows open during your published hours whether or not a single agent is logged in. That is usually what you want — a customer should not see “away” because your team is between shifts — but it means the widget can say you are open when nobody is there. Your AI agent keeps answering regardless; hours govern what people can expect from your team. With it off, presence decides. The widget follows whether agents are actually online. Right for a small team whose hours are genuinely irregular; wrong for anyone who wants a predictable promise.

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Setting the week

Save with Update business hours settings.
There is one opening and one closing time per day — no split shifts. A business that opens 9–13 and 14–18 cannot express the lunch break here; you set 9–18 and the widget says you are open through it. If a genuine mid-day gap matters, say so in the greeting rather than trying to model it in the schedule.
Set the timezone before the hours, not after. Changing the timezone afterwards reinterprets every time you already entered, and 09:00 quietly becomes 09:00 somewhere else. Get it right first and the hours mean what you typed.

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The out-of-hours message

Unavailable message for visitors is what a customer sees when they arrive outside your hours. The default is generic. Replace it, and make it answer the only question the customer actually has — when will someone reply?
The second version does two jobs: it gives a real time, and it tells the customer the conversation is still worth having tonight. If your agent is attached to the inbox, that second half is true, and saying so is the difference between a message left and a problem solved.

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The three other things this controls

This is the part people miss. Business hours are not only a widget label.
An SLA policy can be set to Only during business hours, and the list view shows each policy as Business hours on or Business hours off.With it on, the SLA clock pauses outside your hours. A conversation arriving at 6pm on Friday against a four-hour first-response target is not breached by Saturday morning — the clock restarts Monday.An SLA set to business hours on an inbox with no business hours configured is measuring against nothing. Configure the hours first.
A live-chat campaign has Trigger only during business hours. On, the campaign stays quiet outside your schedule.Worth turning on for anything that invites a reply. A proactive message at 2am that nobody can answer for seven hours is worse than no message.
Analytics can filter by Business hours, and announces Business hours turned on / Business hours turned off on the timeline.This matters for reading response times honestly. An average that includes overnight looks bad for reasons that are not a performance problem; filtered to business hours it measures the thing you can actually manage.

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What it does not do

  • It does not stop messages arriving. Customers can always message you. Hours change what they are told, not whether they are heard.
  • It does not route anywhere different. Out-of-hours conversations land in the same inbox with the same assignment policy. If you want different handling, use an automation rule.
  • It does not pause your AI agent. The agent works whatever the clock says — which is rather the point of having one.

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Next

Inbox settings

Every other tab on the inbox.

SLA policies

Targets that pause outside your hours.

Campaigns

Outbound that respects the schedule.

AI agents

The part that does not go home.