Free publishing tool
Best time to post on Instagram
Pick where your audience is and read the windows in their local time and in yours. This is a starting hypothesis, not a measurement of your account.
| Day | Audience local time | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 11am to 1pm | Often reported |
| 7pm to 9pm | Quietest | |
| Tuesday | 9am to 1pm | Most reported |
| 7pm to 9pm | Often reported | |
| Wednesday | 9am to 1pm | Most reported |
| 7pm to 9pm | Often reported | |
| Thursday | 9am to 1pm | Most reported |
| 7pm to 9pm | Often reported | |
| Friday | 9am to 12pm | Often reported |
| Saturday | 10am to 12pm | Quietest |
| Sunday | 10am to 1pm | Quietest |
Treat this as a starting hypothesis, not a finding
Instagram does not publish engagement by hour. Every table like this one, including this one, is assembled from third-party studies of public posts, and those studies disagree with each other by several hours. What they agree on is the shape: weekday late morning is busier than weekend afternoon.
Your own Instagram Insights beats every global average here, because it describes your followers rather than everyone's. Use these windows to pick a first schedule, then replace them with what your own account tells you after a few weeks.
Times convert using your browser's timezone database, so daylight saving is handled for the current date. A window near a clock change can move by an hour on the day itself.
The timezone is the part people get wrong
Almost every posting-time article publishes its hours without saying whose hours they are. They are the audience's. A window that reads 9am to 1pm means 9am where the people scrolling are sitting, and it is worth nothing as an instruction to a founder in a different country.
This is the most common scheduling mistake and the easiest to fix. A founder in Berlin posting for a US audience at 9am local is arriving at 3am in New York, into a feed that has had six hours to bury the post by the time anyone opens the app. The converter above exists for exactly this, and it is the only part of this page that is arithmetic rather than inference.
If your audience is genuinely spread across continents, pick the timezone holding the largest share rather than splitting the difference. A compromise time is usually a time that suits nobody.
What the evidence does and does not support
Instagram has never published engagement by hour. Every table of best posting times, this one included, is assembled from third-party studies that sampled public posts, and those studies disagree with each other by several hours in both directions.
What they do agree on is the shape rather than the precision. Weekday late morning consistently beats weekend afternoon. Tuesday through Thursday consistently beats Sunday. A second, smaller peak shows up on weekday evenings. That is roughly the resolution the evidence supports, which is why the windows above are hours wide and labelled by how often they are reported rather than given to the minute.
Treat any tool that tells you to post at 11:47 on Wednesday as inventing precision it cannot have.
Replace this table within a month
A global average is a reasonable way to choose a first schedule when you have no data of your own. It is a poor reason to keep a schedule once you do, and most accounts have enough within a month.
- Open Instagram Insights and find the most active hours for your own followers. That data describes your audience; nothing on this page does.
- Post inside one window consistently for two or three weeks before judging it. A single post tells you about that post, not about the hour.
- Change one thing at a time. Moving the hour and the format together leaves you unable to say which mattered.
- Watch reach rather than likes. Likes follow reach, so reach is the number that tells you whether the timing helped.