Best time to post on LinkedIn

The week, by how many studies agree

Each cell is one hour. The darker it is, the more of the 4 studies we plot name that hour for LinkedIn. It counts agreement between studies, not engagement - these samples measured different things and cannot be averaged.

What is specific to LinkedIn

• LinkedIn is the one platform where every study agrees on something: weekends are worst. Hootsuite explains why in plain terms - "most users treat LinkedIn as a weekday platform, checking in before, during, and after work hours". Metricool reaches the same conclusion from its own data: "the best time to post is during the working day, regardless of the day of the week".
• AuthoredUp is the only study in this whole category that measured how big the timing effect actually is, across 3 million posts. For personal profiles "the gap between the 'best' and 'worst' day is under 10%", and weekday-versus-weekend engagement "lands within roughly 7%" across the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Company Pages are the exception, where Wednesday runs about 1.7 times higher than Sunday.
• Metricool's 2026 study found LinkedIn engagement up nearly 14% while every visible metric fell - likes down 13%, comments down 17%, shares down 10%, clicks up 5%. Growth has moved into clicks, carousel swipes and video views. Any timing study that ranks hours by likes and comments is measuring a shrinking signal.

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.

• “Posting at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday won't rescue a post that isn't relevant or valuable to your audience.”

  Buffer

• “The difference between the best and worst format dwarfs the difference between the best and worst posting hour.”

  AuthoredUp

Questions

What is the best time to post on LinkedIn?

The working day, Tuesday to Thursday, is as precise as the evidence honestly gets. Sprout says 11am to 5pm, AuthoredUp says 8am to 11am, Hootsuite says 4am to 6am and Buffer says 3pm to 8pm. Every one of them agrees that weekends are worst, which is the strongest finding on this page.

How much does posting time actually change LinkedIn engagement?

Less than most of this category implies. AuthoredUp, measuring 3 million posts, found the gap between the best and worst day is under 10% for personal profiles, and that weekday versus weekend lands within roughly 7%. They also found that "the difference between the best and worst format dwarfs the difference between the best and worst posting hour" - a carousel at a mediocre hour usually beats a plain text update at the perfect time.

Should companies and personal profiles post at different times?

The day matters more for Company Pages. AuthoredUp found a US Company Page runs about 1.7 times higher on Wednesday than Sunday, and weekdays beat weekends by roughly 48% - a much larger effect than the under-10% spread they measured on personal profiles.

Is posting on LinkedIn at the weekend a waste of time?

It is the worst window by every study we read, but AuthoredUp put the personal-profile penalty at roughly 7%, not a cliff. If the weekend is when you can write something worth reading, that trade is usually worth taking.

Are these LinkedIn times in my timezone?

Yes. Sprout, Buffer, Hootsuite and AuthoredUp all publish LinkedIn windows in local time, so the heatmap places them on your clock as published. None of them publishes how their normalisation works.

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 LinkedIn 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 LinkedIn in 20264.8 million posts over roughly two years.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 2026-07-22we read it 2026-08-25
3. HootsuiteBest Time to Post on LinkedInOver 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.page dated 2025-11-19we read it 2026-08-25
4. AuthoredUpBest Time to Post on LinkedInOver 3 million LinkedIn posts, with US, European and Asia-Pacific breakdowns.Engagement by day and hour, and the only study here that publishes the size of the timing effect itself.Local time.page dated 2026-08-11we read it 2026-08-25
5. Metricool · not plottedLinkedIn Study 2026673,658 posts from 63,108 accounts, Jan to Feb 2025 and Jan to Feb 2026.Posts published through Metricool, measured for views and interactions.States no timezone on any page we read, so its hours cannot be placed on a clock.page dated 2026-04-14we 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.