Best Time to Post on LinkedIn in 2026: 3 Studies Compared

Short answer: post on LinkedIn on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday around 4–5 p.m. in your audience's local time. That is where the two biggest 2026 studies overlap: Sprout Social's best windows on those days run from late morning to 4 or 5 p.m., and Buffer's top-ranked hour on each of them is 4 or 5 p.m. Hootsuite points to mornings instead, and everyone agrees weekends are weak. Treat these as starting points: the best time to post tool shows all three studies side by side, and on a LinkedIn Page PostBoost can work out your own best hours from your posts.

LinkedIn posting times by weekday, three studies#

All times are the audience's local time. Sprout Social gives windows, Buffer gives its top three single hours per day, Hootsuite gives one time per day.

Read across the rows rather than down a single column:

• Tuesday to Thursday, late afternoon is the one window two studies share. Buffer's first-ranked hour is 4 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday and 5 p.m. on Thursday, all inside Sprout Social's windows. Wednesday 4 p.m. is Buffer's strongest slot overall.
• Friday afternoon splits them: Sprout Social stops at 2 p.m., Buffer's top hours start at 3 p.m.
• Monday is Buffer's weakest day, while Sprout Social and Hootsuite still give it a slot.
• Late evenings (9–10 p.m.) show up only in Buffer's data, mostly as second or third picks. Buffer ranks single hours, so an hour can make its list without being part of a longer window.

Why the studies disagree#

They measure different things on different accounts:

• Sprout Social analysed nearly 2 billion engagements across 307,000 profiles on six networks, from 27 November 2025 to 27 February 2026, and reports windows of peak engagement. It names no weekend times at all.
• Buffer analysed more than 4.8 million LinkedIn posts sent through Buffer, normalised to each account's local time, and ranks the top hours for each day by engagement (reactions, comments and reposts).
• Hootsuite worked with Critical Truth on more than a million posts, localised across 118 countries. Its LinkedIn page contradicts itself: the key takeaways and FAQ say Tuesday and Wednesday 8–9 a.m., the body says 4–6 a.m. on the same days. Some of its charts are labelled Q4 2024.

So a "best time" is an average of other people's audiences. Each study is honest about its own sample; none of them is your audience.

Which LinkedIn posting times to test first#

1. Pick your audience's time zone. If most followers sit in one region, schedule on their clock. On a LinkedIn Page, the follower analytics break followers down by location, seniority, job function, industry and company size.
2. Start with the overlap: Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday around 4–5 p.m. local time.
3. Add one morning slot to test Hootsuite's finding, for example Tuesday or Wednesday around 8–9 a.m.
4. Keep the rest steady for three to four weeks: similar post types, similar length, a cadence you can hold. Buffer's data says two to five posts a week is where most accounts start to see results.
5. Compare like with like. Use one engagement rate method for every post (reach or impressions, not followers on some and impressions on others). Engagement rate by reach vs followers explains the choice.

Sprout Social also breaks its LinkedIn data down by industry, and every sector it lists still lands on weekdays: software and technology on Tuesdays and Wednesdays 10 a.m.–4 p.m., financial services on Tuesdays and Wednesdays 10 a.m.–3 p.m., education on Tuesdays 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

Find your own best time on a LinkedIn Page with PostBoost#

Studies are a start. Once you post from PostBoost, your own history is the better source, with one limit to know up front: it works for LinkedIn Pages, not personal profiles. PostBoost imports each Page post's statistics every day; for a personal profile it imports follower and profile-level numbers only, so there are no per-post results to learn from.

How the scores are worked out:

• PostBoost looks at the Page's posts from the past 365 days and needs at least 10 published posts with imported statistics before it suggests anything.
• Each post's engagement rate is compared with the posts published around it, so a Page that grows over the year doesn't make every recent hour look good.
• Recent posts weigh more than old ones, and an hour backed by a single post is pulled toward the average, so it can't outrank an hour backed by many posts.
• Every weekday and hour gets a score from 0 to 100, where 50 is the Page's own average.

In the composer#

1. Write the post and select your LinkedIn Page.
2. Click Schedule. The Best times to post panel shows taller bars for hours where the Page tends to beat its own average, with up to three Top picks (at most one per weekday). Click a pick to use it.
3. Posting the same update to several accounts? Click Set a time per account, then Use each account's best time: each account gets its own next best slot, so your LinkedIn Page and your X account don't have to share one compromise hour.

The Best time to post card on the Home page shows the soonest good hour that has nothing scheduled in it yet.

With the API#

curl -s "https://postboost.co/app/api/$WORKSPACE_UUID/analytics/best-times?accounts[]=$LINKEDIN_PAGE_UUID&timezone=Europe/London" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $POSTBOOST_API_TOKEN"

The response gives the next recommended date and time for each account, within the next 14 days and never in the past:

{
  "timezone": "Europe/London",
  "times": [
    { "account_id": 12, "account_uuid": "…", "date": "2026-10-21", "time": "16:00" }
  ]
}

An account without enough history is left out of times. Reference: Get best posting times.

From Claude or another AI assistant#

With the PostBoost connector added to your assistant, ask:

Find the next best time for my LinkedIn Page and schedule my draft about the Q4 product update then.

The assistant calls get-best-posting-times, then passes the returned scheduled_at and the same timezone to schedule-post. Schedule social media posts with Claude shows the setup.

Get the study times without an account#

The free best time to post tool shows the same three studies for LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok, with sources and a time zone converter for audiences abroad. Developers can read the data as JSON with no API key: GET https://postboost.co/app/api/tools/best-time-to-post?network=linkedin (docs).

Before you schedule, run the post through the social media post checker to see where LinkedIn's "…see more" fold falls; the LinkedIn character limit guide covers every LinkedIn cap. When you are ready to test on your own Page, create a free PostBoost account.