How to See Your Friends' Birthdays on Facebook in 2026 (and Why It Got Harder)

For years, Facebook was the quiet engine behind everyone’s birthday game. You’d log in, see “It’s Sarah’s birthday today,” dash off a “Happy birthday! 🎉,” and feel like a good friend. No effort, no system, no forgetting.

Then, slowly, that stopped working. The notifications got flaky. The birthday list got buried. And the one feature power-users loved — exporting all your friends’ birthdays to your own calendar — vanished entirely.

If you’ve found yourself thinking “wait, where did the birthdays go?”, you’re not imagining it. Here’s how to find them on Facebook today, why it’s become unreliable, and how to make sure you never depend on a single app’s mood again.

How to see friends’ birthdays on Facebook (desktop)

The feature still exists — it’s just harder to reach than it used to be. On a computer:

Open Facebook and click Friends in the left-hand menu (you may need to click See more first).
Look for the Birthdays tab or section.
You’ll see today’s birthdays and a list of upcoming ones for the month.

That’s it — but notice there’s no longer a tidy “download all birthdays” button anywhere on that page. We’ll come back to why.

How to see birthdays on the Facebook mobile app

On the iOS or Android app, the path moves around between versions, but it’s usually:

Tap the menu (the icon with your profile photo, or the three lines).
Scroll to and tap Events.
Tap Birthdays to see who’s coming up.

If you don’t see Events right away, use the search bar at the top of the menu and type “Birthdays” — Facebook will usually surface the shortcut.

How to turn birthday notifications back on

A lot of people don’t realise their birthday alerts quietly switched off during an app update. To check:

Go to Settings & privacy → Settings.
Open Notifications.
Find Birthdays and make sure notifications are allowed — on Facebook itself and pushed to your phone.

Also worth checking: your phone’s own notification settings for the Facebook app, since a system-level toggle will override anything you set inside Facebook.

Why Facebook birthdays got unreliable

Even with everything switched on, Facebook birthdays aren’t the safety net they once were. Three things changed:

The calendar export was removed. Back in June 2019, Facebook quietly killed the option to export friends’ birthdays as an .ics file you could sync to Google, Apple, or Outlook Calendar. The stated reason was privacy — an exported birthday would stick around on your calendar even if that friend later made their birthday private. Reasonable, but it means you can no longer pull your birthdays out of Facebook and into a system you control. (Digital Trends)
Notifications depend on other people. You only see a birthday if that friend has shared their date and left it visible to friends. As more people lock down their profiles, more birthdays simply disappear from your feed.
You have to actually open Facebook. If you’ve drifted away from the app — as a lot of people have — the birthdays sitting inside it might as well not exist. No app, no reminder.

The uncomfortable truth: relying on Facebook means trusting one company’s product decisions, one friend’s privacy settings, and your own habit of logging in — three things you don’t control.

How to save the birthdays you can still see

Since there’s no export button, the reliable move is to capture the dates while you can and move them somewhere permanent:

Open your Facebook Birthdays list (steps above).
For each person, note their name and the day and month. Facebook rarely shows the birth year for friends, and that’s fine — the day and month are what a reminder needs.
Drop them into one master list — a spreadsheet, your contacts, or a dedicated reminder app.

Yes, it’s a little tedious. But you only do it once, and then those dates are yours — independent of whether Facebook keeps the feature, and whether you keep using Facebook at all.

Build a birthday system you actually control

Once your dates live somewhere you own, the goal is simple: get reminded before the day, wherever you are, without having to open any social app. That’s exactly why we built CakeAlert.

You bring your birthdays in once — paste them from a spreadsheet, add them from your contacts, or type in the handful you rescued from Facebook — and from then on CakeAlert does the remembering:

Reminders that fire before the day — a week ahead so you can plan or order a gift, and again the morning of so you actually send the message.
Time-zone-aware alerts, so a friend abroad gets wished at a sane hour, not at your midnight.
AI-written greetings in your own voice — tap to copy, send, done — for the moments you’re staring at a blank message box.
Nothing to remember to check. No feed to scroll, no app to open on the right day. The reminder comes to you.

It’s the part of Facebook you actually liked — never missing a birthday — rebuilt as something you own and control.

The bottom line

You can still find friends’ birthdays on Facebook: Friends → Birthdays on desktop, or Events → Birthdays in the app, with notifications switched on in both Facebook and your phone settings. But the export is gone, the alerts depend on other people’s privacy choices, and it all falls apart the moment you stop opening the app.

The fix isn’t a better Facebook trick — it’s owning the dates yourself and handing the remembering to something built for exactly that job. Rescue your birthdays while you can see them, put them somewhere permanent, and let a real reminder system take it from there.

Tired of Facebook deciding whether you remember? Create a free CakeAlert account — no card needed, 25 birthdays free — and never miss the people who matter.