Best time to post on YouTube

The week, by how many studies agree

Each cell is one hour. The darker it is, the more of the 2 studies we plot name that hour for YouTube. It counts agreement between studies, not engagement - these samples measured different things and cannot be averaged.

What is specific to YouTube

• Read this map differently from the others. On YouTube the published advice is to upload BEFORE the peak, not at it. Buffer: "try to publish one to two hours before your audience's peak activity window. This gives YouTube time to process, index, and start testing your video so it's ready to be recommended right as viewers come online." SocialPilot says the same, so that by the time your audience peaks "the video already has positive early signals".
• Shorts behave differently from long-form and the studies treat them separately. Buffer finds Friday strongest for Shorts, with 4pm, 6pm and 7pm the top three slots, against Sunday 10am for long-form. The map above plots long-form windows only.
• Shorts are also the one format where a source explicitly says timing matters less. Buffer: Shorts "are continuously resurfaced by YouTube's recommendation engine over days or even weeks, which means the initial publish time is less make-or-break". If you publish Shorts, spend your effort on the hook rather than the clock.
• Sprout and Hootsuite publish no YouTube windows we could read, so this map rests on two studies rather than the three or four the other platforms get. Treat it as the thinnest evidence on the site.

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 YouTube?

Weekday afternoons by SocialPilot's data, weekday mornings by Buffer's, and the two overlap less than on any other platform here. The more useful rule is the one both agree on: upload one to two hours before your audience's peak viewing time rather than during it.

Why upload before the peak instead of at it?

Because YouTube needs time to process, index and start testing a video before it can recommend it widely. Buffer's wording is that publishing one to two hours early leaves the video "ready to be recommended right as viewers come online". SocialPilot frames it as arriving at the peak with positive early signals already collected.

Do YouTube Shorts have a different best time?

Yes, and they matter less. Buffer finds Friday strongest for Shorts with 4pm, 6pm and 7pm the top slots, against Sunday 10am for long-form. They also find Shorts are resurfaced by the recommendation engine over days or weeks, so the publish time is "less make-or-break" than for long-form.

How reliable is YouTube timing data?

Less reliable than the other platforms on this site. Only two studies we found publish day-by-day YouTube windows, and they disagree about which day is best. Your own Analytics "when your viewers are on YouTube" report beats both.

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. BufferThe Best Time to Post on YouTube in 20261.8 million videos, long-form and Shorts.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 2026-07-24we read it 2026-08-25
2. SocialPilotBest Time to Post on YouTube in 2026301,000 YouTube videos published by more than 27,000 channels.Views and engagement on videos scheduled through SocialPilot.Local time.page dated 2026-05-01we 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.