Best time to post on TikTok in 2026

The short answer

Start with a weekday afternoon, between about 1 and 6 p.m. in your audience’s local time, and test one weekend morning against it. Weekday afternoons are where the large studies overlap. Sprout Social finds Tuesday to Thursday from 2 to 6 p.m. strongest, Buffer’s weekday peaks include Monday and Thursday at 1 p.m., and Hootsuite names Wednesday and Friday from 4 to 6 p.m.

Weekends are where they part ways, which is why the test matters. Buffer ranks Saturday as TikTok’s best day and Sunday at 9 a.m. as its single best slot. Sprout Social finds no peak on Saturday and calls Sunday the worst day to post. Both are measuring real accounts. Yours will side with one of them, and a month of testing tells you which.

What three studies found

Each study covers a different set of accounts. On Instagram the three mostly agree on the days; on TikTok they do not, so treat any single chart with care.

The best time to post on TikTok, day by day

If you post on a fixed day, this is what each study suggests for it, in local time. A dash means the study names no peak that day: Sprout Social says there are no best times on Saturday and ranks Sunday last.

Why TikTok timing is harder to pin down

TikTok decides who sees a video mostly from the video, not from who follows you. TikTok’s own explanation of For You names three groups of signals: how people interact with videos (likes, shares, comments, watching to the end), information about the video (captions, sounds, hashtags), and device and account settings. It also says follower count is not a direct factor.

So the hour you post matters less than on Instagram or Facebook, where a post starts with your followers. Posting while your audience is online still helps a video collect its first views and interactions, which is what TikTok reads before showing it more widely. But a strong video posted at an average hour will beat a weak one posted at the perfect hour.

That also explains why the studies split. Each draws on a different mix of creators, small businesses and large brands, and when the video carries most of the weight, the hour shifts with whoever is posting. Each study is right about its own accounts.

How to find your own best time to post on TikTok

Three steps, over about a month:

• Check when your viewers are online. TikTok’s analytics, in TikTok Studio, show your viewers’ most active times by hour and by day for the last 7 days, and TikTok’s Creator Academy suggests using them to plan when to post, then checking back to see what works. Look at a few weeks of it before trusting a pattern.
• Test a weekday afternoon against a weekend morning. Post the same kind of video in each slot for three or four weeks and compare the typical result in each, not the single best video. One video that takes off says little about the hour.
• Keep the winner, and check again each quarter. A growing account’s audience changes, and so do its hours.

Post in your audience’s time zone, not yours

All three studies report local time, meaning the time where the viewers are. If most of your audience is in one country, post on its clock. If it is spread out, choose the hours where the largest groups overlap, and schedule ahead so posting never depends on you being awake.

If you schedule with PostEase, the Performance page does the comparison for you. Its “When you publish” view lines up your posts by the hour they went out, in your workspace’s time zone, and shows the median views at each hour once three posts share it.

Questions

Sources

1. TikTok, Using analytics as a tool to improve video performance, October 2026.
2. Buffer, The best time to post on TikTok, September 2026.
3. Sprout Social, Best times to post on TikTok, March 2026.
4. Hootsuite, The best time to post on TikTok, November 2025.
5. TikTok, How TikTok recommends videos #ForYou, June 2020.