Best time to post on TikTok: what two big studies found

Two big studies looked at this in 2026 and came back with different answers. Sprout Social found the best time to post on TikTok is Tuesday to Thursday, 2 to 6 p.m. local time, with Sunday the worst day. Buffer, using 7.1 million posts, found engagement peaks between 6 and 11 p.m. and that Saturday is the strongest day.

Both are real data. They disagree because they measured different accounts, and neither of them measured yours.

This guide shows both sets of times in full, explains why they clash, and then shows you where TikTok itself tells you when your followers are online. That last number beats both studies.

The short answer from each study

	Sprout Social (2026)	Buffer (2026)
Data behind it	Nearly 2 billion engagements across 307,000 profiles	7.1 million TikTok posts
Best window	Tuesday to Thursday, 2 to 6 p.m.	6 to 11 p.m.
Best days	Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday	Saturday
Worst day	Sunday	Wednesday
Weekends	Lowest overall	Saturday is the strongest day

Read the last two rows twice. Sprout says weekends are the weakest. Buffer says Saturday is the best day. Sprout’s best days include Wednesday. Buffer says Wednesday is the quietest. That is not a small gap.

Sprout Social’s best times, day by day

Sprout Social’s 2026 study is the one most search results repeat. All times are local to your audience.

Day	Best time (Sprout Social, 2026)
Monday	3 to 5 p.m.
Tuesday	2 to 6 p.m.
Wednesday	1 to 8 p.m.
Thursday	1 to 5 p.m.
Friday	3 to 5 p.m.
Saturday	No peak window, weekends lowest overall
Sunday	Worst day of the week

The shape is a weekday afternoon. Wednesday has the widest window, 1 to 8 p.m. The weekend is a gap.

Buffer’s best times, day by day

Buffer’s 2026 study looked at 7.1 million posts. It found that engagement generally peaks in the evening, 6 to 11 p.m., and that afternoons from 12 to 5 p.m. are lower. But its best single slots are not all evenings.

Day	Best slots (Buffer, 2026)
Sunday	9 a.m. and 1 p.m., two of the top three slots of the week
Monday	1 p.m., one of the top three slots of the week
Wednesday	Quietest day
Thursday	1 p.m.
Friday	6 p.m.
Saturday	5 p.m., 4 p.m. and 3 p.m., the strongest day overall

So Buffer’s top three single slots are Sunday 9 a.m., Monday 1 p.m. and Sunday 1 p.m. Its strongest whole day is Saturday. Its general rule is evenings. Even inside one study, the answer depends on which question you ask.

Why the two studies disagree

Neither study is wrong. They measured different sets of accounts.

Sprout Social looked at nearly 2 billion engagements across 307,000 profiles. Buffer looked at 7.1 million posts. Those are not the same accounts. An account that posts on weekdays collects weekday engagement. An account that posts on Saturday collects Saturday engagement. Each study finds the pattern of the accounts it can see. The same is true of any other study you find, including the ones that quote these two.

There is also a time zone problem. “2 p.m. local time” means local to the audience, and a global study averages across many time zones at once.

The lesson is not “pick Sprout” or “pick Buffer”. The lesson is that a study of other people’s accounts is a starting point, and your own analytics are the answer.

How to find your own best time on TikTok

TikTok shows you when your followers are online. You need at least 100 followers to see it (TikTok Help, TikTok analytics).

1. Open TikTok and go to your Profile.
2. Open TikTok Studio. On some accounts this is under Creator tools, then Analytics.
3. Tap the Followers tab.
4. Scroll to Most active times. It shows activity by hour and by day.
5. Note the two or three busiest hours and the busiest days.

Those hours are your first test. Post there for two weeks, then try the study times for two weeks, and compare. If you are under 100 followers, use the Sprout weekday afternoon as your first test and the Buffer evening as your second. Our free TikTok counter shows the live follower count if you want to see how close you are to 100.

Tip: change one thing at a time. If you switch the posting hour and the topic in the same week, you will not know which one moved the number.

Why timing matters less than you think on TikTok

The TikTok help page on recommendations explains how the For You feed works. Each new video goes to a small group first. If that group watches, finishes, likes and shares, the video goes to a bigger group. Follower count is not a signal.

Timing helps at exactly one point in that chain. If you post when your followers are online, the first group has a better chance to include people who already like you, and they are more likely to react.

But the For You feed keeps serving a video for days. A video that passes the first test on a Tuesday afternoon is still being shown on Friday night. So the best posting hour cannot save a video with a slow opening, and a great opening survives a bad hour.

Put the effort in that order: hook first, length second, caption third, timing fourth. Our guide on how to get more views on TikTok covers the first three.

Best time to post on TikTok on Saturday

This is the one day where the studies clash the most, so it gets its own answer.

Buffer (2026) found Saturday is the strongest day of the week, with the best slots at 5 p.m., 4 p.m. and 3 p.m. Sprout Social (2026) found weekends are the lowest overall and lists no Saturday window at all.

If your own analytics show Saturday activity, post in the mid to late afternoon and follow Buffer. If your followers are quiet on Saturday, that day is a good one to skip, and the Sprout weekday afternoons are a better bet. Either way, log the views of a Saturday post next to a weekday post and let the numbers settle it.

Bought views and timing

We sell TikTok views at $4.95 per 1,000 and TikTok likes from $2.95, so here is the honest note.

Bought views do not change the test group’s reaction. The For You feed decides how far a video travels by watching what real people do in the first rounds, and bought views are not those people. Posting at a better hour does more for reach than any number of bought views.

What bought views do: make a video look watched when a new visitor scrolls your profile. That is a profile problem, not a reach problem. If that is the problem you have, orders start within minutes and need only a video link, never a password. Buying views is against TikTok’s terms, and the usual response is removal of the fake numbers.

A two-week test routine

• Week one: post at the busiest hour your analytics show, on your three busiest days.
• Week two: post at the same hours but move one day to the weekend.
• Log the views of each video after 48 hours.
• Keep the topic and the hook style the same across both weeks.
• At the end, keep the two slots that won and drop the rest.

Run the test again in three months, because audiences move. For the Instagram version of this test, see our guide on the best time to post on Instagram. And if the goal is a video that travels, our guide on how to go viral on TikTok explains the part timing cannot do.