Free publishing tool
Best time to post on TikTok
Filter by day, pick where your audience is, and read the windows in their time and yours. This is a starting hypothesis, not a measurement of your account.
Showing all 12 windows.
| Day | Audience local time | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 10am to 12pm | Often reported |
| Tuesday | 9am to 12pm | Most reported |
| 7pm to 9pm | Often reported | |
| Wednesday | 9am to 12pm | Most reported |
| Thursday | 9am to 1pm | Most reported |
| 7pm to 9pm | Often reported | |
| Friday | 10am to 1pm | Often reported |
| 5pm to 7pm | Quietest | |
| Saturday | 11am to 1pm | Often reported |
| 7pm to 9pm | Often reported | |
| Sunday | 10am to 12pm | Quietest |
| 7pm to 9pm | Often reported |
Treat this as a starting hypothesis, not a finding
TikTok does not publish engagement by hour. Every table like this one, including this one, is assembled from third-party studies that sample public posts, and those studies disagree with each other by several hours. The shape they share is weekday mid-morning to early afternoon with a second peak in the evening, and, unlike Instagram, weekend evenings are reported as reasonable because TikTok is a leisure feed.
Timing also matters less here than on a follower feed. The For You page shows a new video to a test batch of people who do not follow you and widens or stops based on how that batch responds, so the first few hours after posting matter more than the hour on the clock. A strong video posted at a quiet time still gets its test; a weak one posted at the peak still fails it.
TikTok Studio → Analytics → Followers → Most active times describes your audience rather than everyone's. Use these windows to pick a first schedule, then replace them with what that chart 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.
Timing matters less on TikTok than people think, and differently
On a follower feed, the hour you post decides who scrolls past it. On TikTok most views come from the For You page, which shows a new video to a small batch of people who do not follow you, watches how they respond, and widens or stops from there. The hour does not decide who eventually sees the video. It decides who is awake for the first batch.
That reframes what a posting window is for. You are choosing the audience for a test, so you want the hours when the people most likely to watch to the end are on the app, in their timezone. Completion rate and rewatches carry the video after that; the clock does not.
It is also why weekend evenings appear in the table below in a way they never would for LinkedIn. TikTok is a leisure feed, and Saturday night is leisure.
What the evidence does and does not support
| Claim | Supported? |
|---|---|
| Weekday mid-morning to early afternoon is busier than weekend mornings | Consistently reported across studies |
| A second, smaller peak on weekday evenings | Often reported |
| Weekend evenings are dead time | Not supported; several analyses rank them as moderate |
| An exact minute, such as 7:47pm on Thursday | No study has that resolution, so no table can |
| Posting time decides whether a video takes off | No; watch time and completion decide distribution |
Replace this table within a month
- Open TikTok Studio, then Analytics, then Followers, and read the most active times. That describes your audience; nothing on this page does.
- Post inside one window for two or three weeks before judging it. A single video tells you about that video.
- Watch average watch time and completion rather than likes. Likes follow reach, and reach follows completion.
- Change one thing at a time. Moving the hour and the hook together leaves you unable to say which mattered.