Best Time to Post on TikTok

6 PM to 9 PM Eastern was the best three-hour window in our study, and the single best hour was 7 PM ET, at +15% views over each creator's typical video across 461 videos. The worst was the middle of the night, 3 AM to 6 AM ET, at −17%. Everything from 6 AM to midnight landed within a few percent of typical.

Each video is compared with its own creator's median views, so a 10,000-follower account counts as much as a 3-million one. Times are US Eastern; for Central subtract one hour, for Pacific three.

There isn't one worth planning around. Every day of the week landed within 3% of typical, and for every day the 95% range of our estimate includes no difference at all. Tuesday and Wednesday came out a whisker ahead; Monday and Thursday a whisker behind.

The big studies disagree too, which is what you would expect if the day hardly matters. Sprout Social calls Tuesday to Thursday the best days and Sunday the worst; Buffer, from 7.1 million posts, calls Saturday the best day and Sunday at 9 AM the single best time. Both measure engagement; this study measures views, against each creator's own typical video.

The strongest three-hour window on each day, Eastern Time. Each rests on 77 to 199 videos, so read these as leanings rather than rules: at these sample sizes, the gap between a day's best window and its next best can be chance.

Two ways, and both beat any average. TikTok Studio shows when your audience is on TikTok: open Analytics, then the Viewers or Followers tab, and look at Most active times, the hours and days your audience was most active in the last 7 days, per TikTok's article on using analytics. TikTok's own advice is to plan posts around it and check back on what works.

The checker at the top of this page answers the other half: when your posts actually did well. Enter your username and it compares your last ~60 posts by the day and time they went up, in your own time zone, each against your typical views. It leaves out posts younger than 3 days and will not rank a slot with fewer than 3 posts in it.

The study's best hour, converted. This holds for most of the year; for a few weeks in spring and autumn the US and Europe change their clocks on different dates.

A little, at the edges. Avoiding the small hours is the one clear gain in the data; between 6 AM and midnight the differences are a few percent either way. TikTok ranks the For You feed mostly by how people interact with a video, including how long they watch it, so the video itself decides far more than its timestamp. How to go viral on TikTok covers what TikTok says does move the needle.

On 2026-10-26, TikTok accounts were found by searching 60 niche keywords, from food and fitness to nurses and real estate, keeping accounts with 10,000 to 3,000,000 followers whose posts are registered in the US. Their latest posts were read, pinned posts left out. Kept: videos posted between 29 April and 16 October 2026, so 10 to 180 days old and with most of their views in, at most 40 per creator, from creators with at least 15 such videos: 202 creators and 7,310 videos.

Each video's views were divided by its creator's median, and each slot's figure is the median of those ratios, so one viral video cannot carry a slot. The 95% ranges come from resampling creators 300 times. Rerunning with looser cut-offs (219 creators, 9,536 videos) moved no headline figure by more than a point.

Limits worth knowing: all times are read in US Eastern, though creators post from every US time zone; views say nothing about likes or follows; and a slot that did well may simply be when better videos happened to go up. It shows when posts did well, not why.