There are two big recent studies on the best time to post on YouTube. One says Sunday at 10 a.m. The other says weekday afternoons, and its best days are the first study’s worst days. This post is for anyone who uploads long videos or Shorts and wants a time slot they can defend. It covers what both studies found, the one thing they agree on, what YouTube itself says about publish time, and how to find your own slot in YouTube Studio in about ten minutes.
Short version: the best time to post on YouTube Shorts, going by the data, is Friday evening. For long-form, the studies split, YouTube says the clock matters less than you think, and the honest answer is in your own Analytics tab.
Best time to post on YouTube for long-form: Sunday morning, or weekday afternoons
Buffer’s study, published in July 2026, looked at about 1.8 million videos. It measured the median engagement for each hour of each day and turned the result into a relative score. For long-form videos, the winner was Sunday at 10 a.m. with a score of 0.95. Sunday at 9 a.m. came second at 0.80. Sunday at noon and Friday at noon followed.
Buffer’s best days were Sunday, then Tuesday, then Monday. Its worst were Wednesday and Thursday. Thursday at 2 p.m. scored 0.11, one of the lowest slots in the whole grid.
SocialPilot’s analysis covered 301,000 videos from more than 27,000 channels, all published through its own scheduler. It measured engagement per view. Its answer for long-form is weekday afternoons in your audience’s local time:
- Monday and Tuesday: 2-4 p.m.
- Wednesday and Thursday: 3-5 p.m.
- Friday: 1-3 p.m.
- Saturday and Sunday: 8-10 a.m.
SocialPilot’s best days are Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Those are Buffer’s two worst days plus one more.
So the same platform, in the same year, measured by two companies that both sell scheduling tools, produced a long-form calendar where Thursday afternoon is either your best slot or very nearly your worst. Both studies do like weekend mornings, which is something. Buffer puts Sunday 10 a.m. on top, and SocialPilot lists 8-10 a.m. for both weekend days. If you need a first guess at the best time to post on YouTube for long videos, a weekend morning is the only slot both datasets back.
(It is also the hour when a good share of the planet is still horizontal.)
Best time to post YouTube Shorts: Friday evening, and both studies agree
Shorts are where the two studies line up. Buffer’s top Shorts slot was Friday at 4 p.m., followed by Friday at 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Its best days were Friday, Saturday and Thursday, and its worst were Tuesday and Monday.
SocialPilot agrees. Same order: Friday, Saturday, Thursday. It also names Friday from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. as the strongest single Shorts window. Two different samples and two different engagement metrics produced the same best time to post Shorts on YouTube. In this field that counts as a scientific consensus.
SocialPilot’s day-by-day Shorts table is busier. It gives two windows on most days (Tuesday 7-11 a.m. or 5-7 p.m., for example) and lists 3-7 a.m. and Sunday after 8 p.m. as the slots to avoid. Even so, the Friday-evening result is the most stable finding in either study.
Our guess at why: a Short is something you watch with your thumb, and Friday at 5 p.m. is when a lot of thumbs are free. Shorts also live mostly in a swipe feed, so they depend less on who subscribed to you and more on who happens to be swiping. If you want to know which of those swipes become views and which become money, we covered it in how YouTube counts and pays for Shorts views.
Why the studies disagree about long-form
Two answers to the best time to post on YouTube look bad, but most of the gap comes from method. Neither study is wrong. They measure different things on different people.
Buffer scores the median engagement of videos posted at each hour. SocialPilot scores engagement relative to views. A video with a big audience and lots of comments can win the first test and lose the second. Each sample is also made of that company’s own users, people who schedule posts through Buffer or through SocialPilot. That leans toward brands, agencies and organised small channels. A gaming channel with a 2 a.m. audience in three continents is probably not well represented in either.
“Engagement” is not “views” either. Neither study says that Sunday 10 a.m. gets you more watch time. Each says that videos posted then drew relatively more likes and comments in that company’s data.
We ran into the same split when we compared four Instagram studies that gave four different answers, and when two big TikTok studies disagreed. The pattern repeats.
Industry studies work well for formats with a broad, swipe-driven audience (Shorts, Reels, TikTok) and much worse for formats where your own subscribers matter (long-form). So no study can hand you the best time to post on YouTube for your own long videos. Your 40,000 subscribers are not the median of 1.8 million videos.
YouTube says publish time is not known to affect long-term performance
YouTube has said this more than once, and it is the most useful sentence anyone has written about the best time to post on YouTube.
In November 2023, YouTube’s Creator Liaison Rene Ritchie wrote on the official YouTube blog that “the algorithm tries to follow the audience.” So if viewers don’t care what time a video goes up, the algorithm probably doesn’t either.
He also pointed to the small print under the Studio timing chart: “publishing time is not known to directly affect long-term performance.” His advice was to use that chart to set expectations for the first few hours, not to run your life by it.
Then, in November 2025, Ritchie went after the most stubborn myth in YouTube timing: upload, leave the video private for 24 to 48 hours, then publish. Search Engine Journal reported his answer. “Waiting 24 to 48 hours is no different than waiting 24 to 48 seconds or weeks or months.” And: “All you’re doing is waiting.” The recommendation system, he said, is “largely based on audience behavior.”
So, from the company that runs the ranking: no hour gets a boost from the algorithm itself. By YouTube’s own logic, the best time to post on YouTube is simply when your viewers are awake.
The publish time decides your first few hours, not your total
This is where timing still earns its keep. When you publish, subscribers get notifications and the video lands in their Subscriptions feed. If most of them are asleep, the first hours are slow. If they are awake and on their phones, the first hours are busy.
A slow start is not a failure, because YouTube keeps recommending a video for months if people watch it. But the early hours feel like a verdict, and creators react to the feeling. They panic-swap a thumbnail, rewrite a title, or post to every Discord server they belong to. We have done all three. On one video we changed the thumbnail twice before lunch because the first hour looked thin. In the end it did roughly what our videos always do, just with a worse thumbnail.
Timing also matters for anything live. A Premiere or a live stream happens at one moment, and people who are not there miss the moment. YouTube’s own help page says the viewer-activity report is meant for this: to “understand when to schedule a Premiere, or to plan your next live stream.” For an ordinary upload, the clock buys you a better first evening. For a live event, it decides whether anyone shows up.
How to find your own best time to post on YouTube in Studio
YouTube already gives you a timing chart built from your own viewers rather than a scheduler’s customers, which makes it the closest thing to a personal best time to post on YouTube. In YouTube Studio, open Analytics, then the Audience tab, and find the report called “When your viewers are on YouTube.” According to YouTube’s help page, it shows when your viewers were on YouTube over the last 28 days. It is a heatmap of days and hours, and darker purple means more of your viewers were around.
Here is how we read it. Find the darkest block on the days you can actually publish. Then schedule the video an hour or two before that block starts, so it is already in the Subscriptions feed when people arrive. Keep that slot for a month before judging it, since one video tells you about the video and not about the slot.
A small channel may see a flat or patchy chart, because there is not enough data yet to show a pattern. In that case, use the studies as a starting point: Friday afternoon or evening for Shorts, a weekend morning for long-form. Then switch to your own chart once it has shape.
Long-form and Shorts audiences can also behave differently on the same channel. If you post both, compare the views in the first 24 hours separately for each format. Don’t average them into one number.
Shorts and long-form can share a channel, not a slot
If you publish both formats, the tempting move is to drop them together and enjoy one big evening. We tried this. It went badly, though not in a dramatic way. Both videos did fine, and we had no idea which one had brought the new subscribers.
So give each format its own best time to post on YouTube. A Short on Friday evening and a long video on a weekend morning, or whatever your heatmap says, but never in the same hour. Then each upload gets its own first few hours, and the numbers in Studio mean something. Two videos in one hour is a controlled experiment with the control removed.
Separate slots also help when you change one of them. Move the Short to Thursday, leave the long video alone, and after four weeks you know what Thursday did. Move both at once and you know nothing, only faster.
Upload early, publish on time
The 24-hour wait is a myth. Uploading early is still a good habit for a different reason: in the same 2025 video, Ritchie said it is reasonable to upload ahead of time so that copyright and monetization checks can finish before the video goes public.
That matters most for music. A Content ID claim found while the video is still private is an annoyance. The same claim found after the video is live, with the comments rolling in, means trimming audio in public.
Our copyright checker gives a sense of how often this happens. About one in four tracks people checked turned up a rights holder’s claim, a little down from the month before (Mubert’s own data, last 28 days). If your background track is generated for the video in Mubert Render, you get an original track cut to the exact length of your video. The licence scope depends on your plan, so read it, but early uploads still help with everything else in the video.
Scheduling is built in. YouTube’s help page on scheduled publishing explains that the video stays private and goes public at the date, time and time zone you choose. Scheduled videos also need to stay private if you want to change the time. One quirk: if your account has a Community Guidelines strike, a scheduled video will not publish during the penalty period. It stays private and waits for you.
Your audience’s time zone, not yours
Every published best time to post on YouTube is in local time, meaning the viewer’s clock, not the uploader’s. “Friday at 4 p.m.” means 4 p.m. where your audience lives. If you are in Berlin and most of your viewers are in the US, the Studio heatmap is the only tool that will tell you which 4 p.m. you mean. The studies can’t.
Small tangent. The same help page notes that the date shown on the watch page is based on Pacific time. So a video you published at 1 a.m. on Monday in Europe can show Sunday’s date to the world. We noticed this when a “Monday video” in a series was dated Sunday under the player, and spent an evening suspecting a bug that turned out to be California. Anyway.
For channels with viewers split across continents, pick the region that brings the most watch time, not the one with the most subscribers. Someone else gets your video at breakfast. That is fine.
A consistent schedule may matter more than the exact hour
YouTube does seem to care about regularity. At least as a test, it has tried paying Shorts creators a bonus for sticking to a posting schedule. Invite only, six countries. Still, the signal is clear. Post every Friday and your audience learns to show up on Friday. Chase a different “golden hour” every week and they forget.
So the best time to post on YouTube, in practice, is a slot you can actually keep. Choose it from your chart, or from the studies if your chart is empty. Keep it for a month. Then move it only if the data says so. That rule is less exciting than “Sunday 10 a.m. is magic,” but it will survive the next study.
A checklist for picking your best time to post on YouTube this week
- Open Studio, then Analytics, then Audience, and screenshot the “When your viewers are on YouTube” heatmap.
- Start Shorts on Friday between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. viewer time if your chart is thin.
- Schedule long-form an hour before your darkest heatmap block, or on a weekend morning.
- Keep Shorts and long-form in different slots.
- Upload as private a few hours early so copyright checks finish first.
- Set the publish time zone to your audience’s, not yours.
- Track first-24-hour views per format for four weeks, then write down your best time to post on YouTube.
- Move a slot only after the numbers move first.
If your heatmap turns out darkest at Sunday 10 a.m., then congratulations, Buffer was right about your best time to post on YouTube. Set the schedule on Saturday night and go back to sleep.
Who we are
