Tip: creating a recurring 5th Sunday event in Google Calendar

I occasionally have the need to create a recurring calendar event on a cadence that isn’t natively supported by Google Calendar. The most prominent example of this is an event that occurs on every 5th Sunday of the month, if one exists. This is very different than the “last” Sunday of the month. One nice workaround that seems to work well is to create an ICS file with the native 5th Sunday syntax and import it. Here’s an example file BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/Denver BEGIN:VEVENT UID:fifth-sunday-recurring-20260531@example.com DTSTAMP:20260503T000000Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20260531 DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20260601 RRULE:FREQ=MONTHLY;BYDAY=5SU SUMMARY:5th Sunday Event DESCRIPTION:All-day event recurring on the 5th Sunday of every month. TRANSP:TRANSPARENT BEGIN:VALARM ACTION:DISPLAY TRIGGER:-P21D DESCRIPTION:5th Sunday Event in 3 weeks END:VALARM END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR The secret is the RRULE:FREQ=MONTHLY;BYDAY=5SU rule, which expresses…