Best time to post calculator

The largest recent studies point to weekday afternoons. On TikTok, Sprout Social found Tuesday to Thursday, 2 to 6 pm strongest; on Instagram, Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons; on Facebook, Tuesday and Wednesday, noon to 8 pm. For YouTube Shorts, SocialPilot found noon to 2 pm or 6 to 7 pm, with Thursday to Saturday strongest. Every time is the viewer's local time.

TikTok, Instagram and Facebook are from Sprout Social's March 2026 studies (about 2 billion engagements on 307,000 profiles, november 2025 to february 2026), which measured engagement: likes, comments and shares. Shorts are from SocialPilot's 2026 data (301,000 videos from more than 27,000 channels scheduled with SocialPilot). SocialPilot gives its Shorts windows for the week as a whole, so the calculator puts them on every day and shades the days by its ranking. Sprout Social says Reels' best times match its Instagram ones.

So the best time to post today is today's row, in your audience's time zone. The calculator above picks the row, converts it to your clock and counts down to the next window.

1. Pick the apps you post on. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts and Facebook, any of them.
2. Check your time zone. It starts as your device's. Type a city to change it.
3. Set your audience's, if it's elsewhere. Tick “My audience is in another time zone” and pick theirs, or a quick pick like US East or the UK. The windows are worked out on their clock and shown on yours.
4. Read today's windows and the countdown. The next window is on top, with each app's windows for today and one time to aim for if you post once.
5. Plan the week. The heat map shows the next 7 days hour by hour on your clock. Copy the week as text, or download it as an .ics file for Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook.

To plan what goes in each slot as well, use the content calendar generator: it suggests days and times from the same studies and puts a clip from your long videos in every post. To have the posts go out on their own, see how to schedule TikToks, Reels and Shorts.

A best time is about when viewers are awake, so it's always in their time zone. If you're in London clipping for a campaign that counts US views, TikTok's Tuesday window of 2 to 6 pm on the East Coast is your evening. And the gap between two places isn't fixed: the US and Europe change their clocks on different weekends, and the southern hemisphere changes the other way.

That's why the calculator works each window out on its real date. Posting for the whole US? Mid-afternoon on the East Coast is late morning on the West Coast, so both are up. And you don't have to be awake for it: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook all let you schedule a post ahead.

Your own analytics beat any study. The studies above average hundreds of thousands of accounts, mostly brands using scheduling tools. Your audience may be students, night-shift workers or in another country. Each app shows when yours is around:

Then test it:

1. Pick two or three times: your analytics' peak and one or two of the study windows.
2. Post at each for a couple of weeks, keeping everything else the same.
3. Compare each video at the same age, say after two days, so one that's been up longer doesn't look better.
4. Keep the winner, and test again every few months as your audience grows.

Follower activity only covers followers, and the For You feed, Reels and the Shorts feed show your videos to people who don't follow you yet. A new account has little to read, so start with the study windows. YouTube says its “When your viewers are on YouTube” report counts your viewers' time on all of YouTube, not only on your channel. More in the best time to post on TikTok, Reels and Shorts.

None of the apps lists the hour a video went up among the reasons it gets shown. TikTok, Instagram and YouTube recommend short videos by how viewers react to them, so the time mostly decides who sees a video first. After that, whether people watch to the end decides how far it goes.

Posting often does more than posting at the perfect hour. In Buffer's study of 11.4 million TikTok posts, accounts got 17% more views per post at 2 to 5 posts a week than at one, and 34% more at 11 or more, mostly because more posts meant more chances at one that took off. See how often to post on TikTok, Reels and Shorts.

That's where the slots get hard to fill. A clip in every window this week on three apps is a lot of editing, unless the clips come from the long videos you already make. Clyper finds the moments in a podcast, stream or video that stand on their own and makes about 10 clips from an hour of it, cut on whole sentences, framed vertically and captioned.