Zoom Template Guide: Save and Reuse Meeting and Webinar Settings

A Zoom template is a saved set of meeting or webinar settings. You make one with Save as Template in the Zoom web portal and pick it the next time you schedule, so you don’t have to set the waiting room, recording, registration, polls and other options again. Zoom has separate templates for meetings and webinars, and admins can publish templates to everyone on an account.

If you got here looking for something else: “template” turns up in a few other places in Zoom, including AI meeting summary templates, email templates, Zoom Events templates and whiteboard templates. Those are separate features. This guide covers scheduling templates, which is what most people searching “template zoom” want. Details are current as of October 2026, and Zoom changes its web portal often, so button names may not match exactly.

How Zoom templates work

A template is a copy of a meeting or webinar you have already set up. Zoom’s personal meeting templates article explains the idea: schedule and save a meeting with the settings you want, then save those settings as a template to use again.

Templates are useful for any session you run over and over: a weekly team sync, office hours, client onboarding calls, or a webinar series where registration and Q&A should be set up the same way each time. They stop you from forgetting things like turning on cloud recording or turning off join-before-host.

Create a personal meeting template

Zoom’s documentation describes doing this in the web portal. I found no official steps for creating one in the desktop app.

1. Sign in to the Zoom web portal and open Meetings.
2. Schedule a new meeting. Make sure it uses an auto-generated meeting ID. Zoom says a meeting that uses your Personal Meeting ID (PMI) can’t be saved as a template.
3. Set the options you want to reuse, such as the waiting room, join before host, automatic recording and security settings, then save the meeting.
4. Open the saved meeting and scroll to the bottom of the page.
5. Click Save as Template and give it a name. The VCU Zoom Blog suggests a general name that fits future sessions, like “Weekly office hours,” instead of one tied to a single date.
6. If the meeting repeats, Zoom lets you include the recurrence schedule in the template.

The meeting you started from stays on your calendar as a normal meeting. If you only made it to build the template, you can delete it.

Schedule a meeting from a template

Once you’ve saved a template, there are two ways to use it:

1. From the Meeting Templates tab. In the web portal, go to Meetings and then Meeting Templates. From there you can view, delete or start scheduling with a template. VCU’s guide calls the button Use This Template.
2. From the scheduling form. When you schedule a new meeting, choose your template from the Template dropdown. NC State’s guide says all the saved settings then fill in automatically.

Either way, you still need to enter the meeting topic, date and start time, and any alternative hosts, because those aren’t saved in the template.

What a meeting template keeps and drops

The limits come from Zoom’s support articles for meetings and webinars. Third-party guides from universities give the same 40-template figure for meetings.

Create a webinar template

Webinar templates work the same way, but they’re a separate feature. Zoom says Save as Template for webinars requires a licensed user with the Zoom Webinars add-on.

1. Sign in to the web portal and go to Webinars.
2. Click the title of a webinar you’ve already set up. Don’t click Edit. Zoom Community answers point out that the template option is on the webinar’s detail page, not in the edit form.
3. Scroll down and click Save as Template.
4. Name the template. If the webinar repeats, choose whether to keep the recurrence schedule.

Zoom’s webinar template article says the template copies all settings from the original webinar except the panelists, alternative hosts and time. That includes basic options, such as whether Q&A is turned off, and more advanced ones, such as poll questions and answers.

Check templates before you rely on them

Zoom says polls are saved in webinar templates, but some users in the Zoom Community have reported polls and resources missing after scheduling from a template. One thread also reported speaker information disappearing. These are user reports, not confirmed bugs, and they may already be fixed. Still, the first time you use a new template, schedule a test webinar from it and check the polls, registration questions, branding and email settings before you invite anyone.

Admin meeting templates

Account owners and admins can create admin meeting templates that users on the account can choose when they schedule. This is how IT teams set up standard meetings for a department, such as a recorded class session or an external client call with specific security settings.

According to Zoom’s admin template article:

1. An admin with permission to edit account settings signs in to the web portal and opens the account settings area. Depending on the portal version, this is labeled Account Management > Account Settings or Admin > Settings.
2. On the Meeting tab, under Schedule Meeting, they turn on Meeting Templates.
3. They can click the lock icon so users can’t change the setting.
4. The setting can also be managed per group under Users and then Groups, by an admin with group-editing privileges.

Admin templates are managed at the account level, and admins choose which groups or users can use them. If you don’t see an admin template you expected, ask your Zoom admin whether it has been assigned to your group. I couldn’t confirm from Zoom’s documentation exactly how visibility rules work in every case.

Also remember that locked account settings override what you pick in a template. If an admin has locked a setting such as the waiting room, your template can’t change it.

Practical tips for long-term use

• Name templates by purpose, like “Client call, recorded” or “Internal standup,” so they’re easy to pick from the dropdown months later.
• Test after changes. If your team’s needs change, schedule a meeting from the template, check that every setting is still what you want, and save an updated template if needed. Then delete the old one so nobody picks it by mistake.
• Audit occasionally. With a cap of 40 meeting templates and 20 webinar templates, old ones add up. Delete the ones you no longer use from the Meeting Templates tab.
• Watch for third-party tools. Some webinar automation tools use Zoom templates to schedule sessions, and one vendor notes that its tool needs an admin-level template rather than a personal one. If you connect Zoom to another platform, check that platform’s documentation for which template type it expects.

When a template isn’t the right tool

If you want the same meeting link every week, a recurring meeting may be simpler than a template, since a template creates a new meeting each time. If what you want is reusable content, like an agenda layout or a structure for meeting notes, Zoom’s scheduling templates won’t do that. Look at the separate meeting summary or whiteboard template features, or your notes tool.