LinkedIn posting schedule: best times

Each row is one published analysis, read from its own page on 2026-11-03. They measure different samples over different periods, so they are listed side by side rather than merged into one number.

They agree the afternoon on midweek days is strong and the weekend is weak. Buffer sees the peak later (3–8 p.m.) and finds Monday and Tuesday weakest, where Sprout Social lists Tuesday among its best days. Wednesday afternoon is the overlap, so start there.

Both large studies express times as the audience’s local time: Sprout Social records every time in local time (a 9 a.m. window is 9 a.m. in Los Angeles, London and Sydney alike), and Buffer says to “consider all the recommendations local time”. If your audience is spread across time zones, schedule for the zone where most of your followers are.

Every figure here is an aggregate across many accounts and industries. It tells you where to start testing, not when your audience is online.

On LinkedIn the studies agree on weekdays and disagree on the hour. Buffer’s best slots are late afternoon and evening (3–5 p.m. on Tuesday to Friday, 10 p.m. on Monday and Sunday), and it finds Monday and Tuesday the weakest days; Sprout Social’s windows sit in working hours, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and it says to avoid the weekend. The overlap is Tuesday to Friday between 3 and 5 p.m.

Sprout Social is the only one of the two studies that splits LinkedIn by industry. Its windows below are in local time, as published on 31 March 2026. They are narrower than the all-industry average because each industry’s audience keeps its own hours: a software audience is online early, a food or retail audience around lunch.

Buffer’s own data finds 2–5 posts a week is where reach per post improves compared with once a week, and the HeyOrca survey’s most common cadence is 2–3 a week (33% of respondents). A few well-made posts a week is the benchmark; posting several times a day is not.

LinkedIn’s own composer schedules text, image, video and document posts for both personal profiles and Company Pages, up to three months ahead, one post at a time. Per Sprout Social’s guide, polls, events and multi-image posts have to be published manually, and there is no bulk scheduling.

LinkedIn posts through SkedCast follow the same rules as the composer: up to 3,000 characters, with text-only posts allowed.

SkedCast holds a scheduled post and publishes it at the time you set, from one content calendar shared with every other connected account, with the same per-platform limits checked when you schedule rather than at publish time. Scheduling never changes when your audience is online; it only makes sure the post goes out in the window you chose.

A study average is a starting hypothesis. Your account’s own results are the evidence. The best time to post tool lists the study windows for every platform side by side, and the posting frequency calculator turns a weekly target into slots. A simple test:

SkedCast’s best-times feature does the “find your own window” step for you where the data exists: a daily job reads each connected account’s own publish history and the engagement analytics SkedCast has ingested for it, and recommends the day-and-hour slots where that account’s posts did best, in the account’s own time zone. It never invents a slot — an account with no analytics data yet simply has none — and how much it can derive depends on what each platform exposes to third-party apps. The same slots are available through the API (GET /v1/best-times, scope besttimes.read) and the MCP get_best_times tool. Best times is included from the Solo plan.