Best time to post on Facebook (and how to find yours)

Search for the best time to post on Facebook and you'll find big studies that disagree on the basics, even on whether mornings or afternoons win. This guide shows what four of them measured, where they overlap, why they clash, and how to find the hours that suit your own Page. Everything below was checked in November 2026.

What the studies say about the best time to post on Facebook

Four well-known social media companies have published Facebook timing data in 2025 and 2026. Read the second column before the last one, because each looked at different accounts.

A few details are easy to miss. Sprout counts engagements across six networks and doesn't say how many of its profiles are Facebook Pages, and its three months include the end-of-year holidays. Buffer doesn't define exactly how it scored engagement or how it normalized time zones. Later's page gives one window with no method behind it, so treat it as a rough pointer, not a benchmark.

Where they agree: Buffer and Sprout both rank midweek above the start and end of the week, and both put weekends near the bottom. Buffer, Hootsuite and Later all lean toward the morning. Where they clash: Buffer finds 12 to 5 p.m. the weakest part of the day, while Sprout's best windows are 12 to 8 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday. Hootsuite's peaks start at 5 or 6 a.m., earlier than anyone else's.

Best day to post on Facebook, day by day

If you came here for the best time to post on Facebook today, find today's row. Sprout gives windows, Buffer gives its single strongest hour and Hootsuite gives its best time. Later doesn't publish times by day.

No hour is the top pick of all three. Buffer and Hootsuite are closest from Tuesday to Friday, both in the early morning, while Sprout points to midday. Treat any row as a guess to test, not a rule. The free content calendar planner can lay your test posts out over a month.

Why the studies disagree

They answer slightly different questions about different people:

• Different accounts. Each company studies its own customers, who differ in industry, size and where their audience lives.
• Different measures. Sprout counts engagements, Buffer reports median engagement without giving its formula, and Hootsuite doesn't say exactly what it counted. A post with a few likes and a post with a long comment thread can count the same way.
• Different periods. Sprout covers late November to late February. Buffer, Hootsuite and Later don't give a date range for their Facebook data.
• Different industries. Sprout and Hootsuite both split results by industry, and the answers vary a lot. Sprout, for example, lists 7 to 11 a.m. on Tuesday for software and technology, while Hootsuite lists 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Sunday for dining, hospitality and tourism.
• Averages hide your audience. A peak across thousands of Pages can't tell you when your own followers scroll Facebook.

Meta's own explanation of Feed ranking points the same way. Its Transparency Center says Feed starts from recent posts and posts with new activity, then gives each one a relevance score based on many signals about the post and the reader. So posting when your followers are around can help a post get seen early, but timing is one signal among many, not a switch.

How to find your own best time on Facebook

Facebook gives Pages two places to look. Both are free.

Active times in Meta Business Suite. When you schedule a post in Meta Business Suite, Meta says Active times suggests times based on when your followers were most active on Facebook and Instagram over the past seven days. Seven days is short, so check it a few weeks in a row before you trust a pattern.

Page Insights. Facebook's Help Center says Insights shows how your Page is doing, who your audience is (age, gender and location) and when your audience is on Facebook. To open it:

1. Log into Facebook and click your profile photo in the top right.
2. Click See all profiles, then select your Page.
3. Click Professional dashboard in the left menu.
4. Click Insights in the left menu.

Two limits from Facebook: demographic data such as location only appears once there is data for 100 or more people, and Insights only goes back two years. Location tells you whose time zone to plan for. If most of your followers live three hours behind you, their 8 a.m. is your 11 a.m.

Keep a simple note of each post's day, hour and type as you go. It makes the comparison much easier at the end of a test.

A simple 4-week test plan

You need a few posts in each time slot and a fair way to compare them. Here is one plan, with example slots: a morning, a midday and an evening slot in your audience's time zone. Swap in whatever suits your Page.

1. Pick three slots. Here we use 8 a.m., 1 p.m. and 7 p.m., so the test covers the morning that Buffer and Hootsuite favor and the afternoon and evening that Sprout favors.
2. Post three times a week for four weeks, on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, rotating the slots so no slot always lands on the same weekday:

3. Keep everything else similar: the same kind of post (for example all photo posts, or all Reels), a similar length and similar topics, so the time is the main difference.
4. Look at each post at the same age, for example three days after posting. Write down its reach and its reactions, comments and shares.
5. For each slot, take the middle result of its four posts, not the best one. One post that takes off can make a slot look better than it is.
6. Keep the winning slot and test one new time against it for another four weeks. Four posts per slot is a small sample, so treat the result as a lean, not proof.

How to post at your best time with Unisenda

Once you have your slots, scheduling lets you hit them without being online. Meta Business Suite is free and schedules Page posts from 20 minutes to 29 days ahead (see how to schedule Facebook posts). A scheduler like Unisenda helps when you also post to other networks or want your test laid out on one calendar. Unisenda posts to Facebook Pages, not personal profiles or groups:

1. Connect your Facebook Page in Connections. You approve access on Facebook's own screen; Unisenda never asks for your password.
2. Click Create post, select your Page and write your text. You can post text, photos, a gallery of up to 10 photos, a feed video, a Reel or a Story.
3. Click Schedule for, pick the date and the time to the minute, check the time zone shown, then click Schedule. If your followers live elsewhere, convert their hour to your time first.
4. Save your usual setup as a Preset. Presets remember your accounts, caption, image shape and time of day. You still choose the date.
5. Open Calendar and choose Week to lay out your test. It's an hour-by-hour planner: click an empty hour to start a post at that time, or drag a scheduled post to another day or hour (with Undo).

Scheduled posts go out from Unisenda's servers, so your computer can be off, and each result links to the live post. Unisenda doesn't show analytics, so you'll still compare results in Facebook's own Insights. You can try the scheduler in the Unisenda demo, where nothing is ever published, and every plan starts with a 7-day free trial.