Best time to post on Facebook

The week, by how many studies agree

Each cell is one hour. The darker it is, the more of the 3 studies we plot name that hour for Facebook. It counts agreement between studies, not engagement - these samples measured different things and cannot be averaged.

What is specific to Facebook

• Where a publisher contradicts itself we plot the more specific page and say so. Hootsuite's dedicated Facebook page and their own round-up disagree by four hours on the same dataset; the map uses the dedicated page.
• The early-morning cluster is the interesting signal: Hootsuite finds Facebook activity peaks between 5am and 8am, and Buffer independently finds weekday mornings from 6am to 11am strongest. Two studies reaching the same unfashionable answer is worth more than either alone.
• Sprout is the outlier that pulls the map toward midday, with Tuesday and Wednesday 12pm to 8pm. Their sample is business profiles managed by Sprout customers, which skews toward pages posting on a work schedule.

Where the studies contradict each other

Every other page on this subject prints one confident grid. These are the places our sources flatly disagree, with both sides named, because that disagreement is the most useful thing we found.

Why this matters less than the rest of the page suggests

Every study on this page is published by a company that sells scheduling software, and most of them tell you plainly that timing is a small lever. We think that is the single most useful thing in the whole category, so we put it here rather than at the bottom.

Only one study we found measured the size of the effect instead of just ranking hours. AuthoredUp, across more than 3 million LinkedIn posts, found the gap between the best and worst day is under 10% for personal profiles, and that weekday against weekend engagement lands within roughly 7%. Company Pages see a larger swing, about 1.7 times between Wednesday and Sunday.

Set against that, the studies here disagree with each other by up to sixteen hours on the same platform. When the disagreement between sources is far larger than the effect any of them measures, precision to the hour is false precision.

The honest version: post in the broad window your audience is awake and reachable, keep the cadence steady, and spend the effort you saved on the post itself. Then replace all of this with your own analytics as soon as you have enough of your own posts to read.

Questions

What is the best time to post on Facebook?

Weekday mornings from about 6am to 9am carry the most agreement, mainly because Hootsuite and Buffer independently land there. Sprout disagrees and puts the peak at midday to 8pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The heatmap shows both, so you can see how thin the consensus really is.

Why do Facebook studies disagree so much?

Because they measure different populations. Sprout measures profiles managed by its own business customers, Buffer measures posts scheduled through Buffer, and Hootsuite normalises across 118 countries. None publishes its normalisation method, so the gap between them cannot be reconciled from the outside.

What is the worst time to post on Facebook?

HubSpot names 4am to 5am and 11pm to midnight, but their page is a survey of marketers rather than measured engagement, so we cite it and leave it off the map. No measured study we read names a worst hour with confidence.

Is Saturday a bad day to post on Facebook?

Buffer says outright that Saturday is the worst day of the week for Facebook, and Sprout publishes no weekend hours at all. Hootsuite is the dissenter, giving Saturday a 6am window like most weekdays.

The studies, read 2026-08-25

Every window above comes from one of these pages. A study we could not put on a clock is listed here too, marked, rather than quietly dropped.

1. Sprout SocialBest Times to Post on Facebook in 2026Nearly 2 billion engagements across roughly 307,000 profiles, 27 Nov 2025 to 27 Feb 2026.Median engagement per hour across the profiles of 30,000+ Sprout customers.Reports in local time. Sprout's 2026 refresh dropped the old US Central Time hub: "schedule your posts for the hours listed below in their respective local time zones".Sprout names no Saturday or Sunday windows on any platform - it calls weekends its worst days and publishes no weekend hours. Read an empty weekend cell as not published, not as no engagement.page dated 2026-03-31we read it 2026-08-25
2. BufferThe Best Time to Post on Facebook in 202614 million posts.The time slots with the highest median engagement.Normalised to the reader's local time, so no conversion is needed - Buffer says its data team makes the recommended timezones "universally applicable", without publishing the method.page dated 2026-02-26we read it 2026-08-25
3. HootsuiteBest Time to Post on FacebookOver 1 million posts across industries and networks.Posts analysed with the data-science agency Critical Truth, localised across 118 countries.Normalised across 118 countries and stated as time-zone agnostic. The normalisation method is not published.Hootsuite's own round-up page names Tuesday 9am for Facebook while this dedicated page names 5am on Tuesdays. Both were live on the day we checked. We plot the dedicated page.page dated 2025-11-19we read it 2026-08-25
4. HubSpot · not plottedThe Best Times to Post on Social Media in 2025 [New Data]Not stated on the page.A survey of marketers, not measured engagement.Unspecified except for TikTok, where it references EST.Left off the heatmap: It asks marketers what they believe rather than measuring posts, states no sample size, and is the oldest page we read.page dated 2025-03-25we read it 2026-08-25

How we built this

We read each study's own page, transcribed its day-by-day windows, and recorded the clock it publishes on. The heatmap shades each hour by how many independent studies name it. It is a count of agreement, not an engagement score: we never blend numbers from studies that measured different things in different ways.

A study only reaches the map if we can put its hours on a clock. Metricool measures the largest samples in this category and states no timezone on any page we read, so its hours are quoted in the text and left off the grid. HubSpot surveys marketers about what they believe rather than measuring posts, so it is left off too. Both are listed with the rest, with the reason attached.

Most publishers now normalise their windows to the reader's local time, so we plot those as published rather than converting them - converting an already-local window is how these pages usually go wrong. Later's TikTok windows are the exception, published in PST, so those we convert to your clock with daylight saving resolved for today.