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

Search for the best time to post on LinkedIn and you'll find big studies that agree on very little. This guide shows what four of them measured, where they overlap, why they clash, and how to find the hours that suit your own audience. Everything below was checked in October 2026.

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

Four well-known social media companies have published LinkedIn 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 307,000 profiles are on LinkedIn. Its three months include the end-of-year holidays. Buffer doesn't define the engagement it measured. Hootsuite's page gives its overall best time two ways, 8–9 a.m. in the summary and 4–6 a.m. in the body, so the day-by-day table below uses its day-by-day times. Later's answer is one team's experience rather than a large study, which makes it a nice example of one account finding its own time, not a benchmark.

None of the four says how many of its accounts were personal profiles instead of company Pages. Buffer says its times apply to both.

Where they agree: weekdays beat weekends, and Wednesday sits in the top group of all three large studies. Where they clash: Sprout and Hootsuite put Tuesday near the top, while Buffer ranks Monday weakest and Tuesday next. Buffer also finds mornings (6–11 a.m.) weaker than afternoons and evenings, while Hootsuite's best times are mostly in the morning. Buffer notes that its own 2025 peaks were almost entirely in working hours and moved later this year, and that its data can't say why.

Best day to post on LinkedIn, day by day

If you came here for the best time to post on LinkedIn 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. The closest is Thursday: Hootsuite's 2 p.m. sits inside Sprout's window, and Buffer's 5 p.m. sits at its end. Treat any row as a guess to test, not a rule.

Our free best time to post tool shows these times on your own clock when your followers live in another time zone, and the free content calendar planner lays 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, and Buffer and Hootsuite don't say exactly what they counted. A post with a few reactions and a post with a long comment thread can count the same way.
• Different periods. Sprout covers late November to late February. Buffer and Hootsuite don't give a date range for their LinkedIn data, and Later's page is from 2025.
• Different industries. Sprout and Hootsuite both split results by industry, and the answers vary a lot. Hootsuite, for example, lists 9 a.m.–1 p.m. Tuesday to Friday for healthcare and Thursday 5–7 p.m. for financial services.
• Averages hide your audience. A peak across thousands of accounts can't tell you when your own connections open LinkedIn.

LinkedIn's own pages point the same way. Its Help Center says the feed looks at signals such as how often a post is viewed or engaged with and how recent it is, along with many signals about the reader. So timing can help a post get early attention, but it's one signal among many. And LinkedIn's marketing blog rounded up three studies in 2024, noted that they share some themes and conflict on others, and advised testing with your own audience.

How to find your own best time on LinkedIn

LinkedIn's analytics show how your posts perform and who follows you. As of October 2026, its help pages list impressions, engagement and follower demographics, but no chart of when your followers are online, the way Instagram Insights has. So you note your posting times yourself. Here is how to open the numbers, following LinkedIn Help on a computer:

1. Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage, then View Profile.
2. Scroll to the Analytics section and click Show all.
3. Click Audience analytics. Under Top demographics, switch to Location. It shows the top five places your followers are in, which tells you whose time zone to plan for.
4. Click Content analytics. Choose a date range, then switch between Impressions and Engagements to see how your posts did and which ones were top performing.
5. For one post, click the Me icon, then Posts & Activity, and click the impressions count or View analytics under the post. LinkedIn lists impressions, members reached, reactions, comments, reposts, saves and sends.

Two cautions from LinkedIn: the numbers are estimates and may not be precise, and your own views and reactions count toward a post's analytics. Keep a note of each post's day, hour and topic as you go, because the analytics won't remind you when you posted.

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 a late-afternoon slot in your audience's time zone. Swap in whatever suits your audience.

1. Pick three slots. Here we use 8 a.m., 12 p.m. and 5 p.m., so the test covers what the studies point to.
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, 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 impressions and its reactions, comments and reposts.
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 at your desk. LinkedIn has its own scheduler, which takes a time from 10 minutes to 3 months ahead (see how to schedule LinkedIn 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 LinkedIn personal profiles only, not company Pages:

1. Connect LinkedIn in Connections. You approve access on LinkedIn's own screen; Unisenda never asks for your password.
2. Click Create post, select your LinkedIn profile and write your text. You can add up to 9 photos or one video, and choose whether the post is visible to anyone or connections only.
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 LinkedIn's own analytics. You can try the scheduler in the Unisenda demo, where nothing is ever published, and every plan starts with a 7-day free trial.