When is the best time to post on TikTok?

TikTok peaks in the evening, roughly 6pm to 10pm, and the weekday effect is weak. That is what the aggregate studies show, and this page converts those windows into your own timezone so you are not mentally subtracting hours from an American article.

Which timezone is the benchmark in?

The underlying figures are published in US Central time (America/Chicago). The heatmap shifts every cell into whichever timezone you pick at the top, so the hours you read are the hours on your clock.

Does posting time still matter now feeds are algorithmic?

Less than it did, but it still matters. A recommendation feed can surface a post hours or days later, so timing no longer decides reach on its own. What it still does is decide who sees it in the first hour, and early engagement is one of the signals the ranking uses, so a good slot helps, and a consistent schedule helps more.

Should I trust this over my own analytics?

No. This is a population average across many accounts and niches, which is a reasonable starting point when you have no data of your own. Once you have a few weeks of posts, your own audience beats every benchmark on this page: a B2B account and a teen-facing account genuinely peak at different hours.

Yes. This tool does its work in your browser, so whatever you type, paste or upload stays on your device. Nothing is sent to our servers, which is also why it keeps working if you go offline after the page has loaded.

Yes. Every tool here is free with no account, no credit card and no usage cap. They exist so that the people who need our scheduling product find us, which only works if the tools are genuinely useful on their own.

Do I need an account?

No. Open the page and use it. An account is only for OctoSpark itself, where you plan, schedule and publish a whole calendar rather than fixing one post at a time.

Can I use the output commercially?

Yes. Anything you produce here is yours, including for client and commercial work. We claim no rights over it and we do not watermark it.

OctoSpark

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Best time to post on TikTok

TikTok peaks in the evening, roughly 6pm to 10pm, and the weekday effect is weak. A week-by-hour heatmap in your own timezone, free and with no signup.

Your timezone

Show these hours in

The published benchmark is in America/Chicago. Your selection is +6h from that, and every cell below has been shifted by exactly that much.

Next strong slot:Wed 2amabout 132h from now

Engagement by day and hour, in Europe/London

Relative engagement index from 0 to 100 for each weekday and hour, in Europe/London.
Day	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23
Mon	77	82	86	77	67	43	20	18	16	13	11	19	28	35	43	51	55	60	64	65	66	66	72	77
Tue	83	87	92	82	72	46	22	20	17	14	12	21	30	38	47	55	60	65	70	71	71	72	78	84
Wed	90	95	100	89	78	50	22	19	17	14	12	21	29	38	46	54	59	64	69	69	70	71	76	82
Thu	88	93	98	87	76	49	21	19	16	14	11	20	28	36	44	52	57	62	66	67	68	68	74	80
Fri	86	90	95	85	74	48	20	18	15	13	11	19	27	35	42	50	54	59	63	64	64	65	70	76
Sat	81	86	90	80	70	45	18	16	14	12	10	18	25	32	39	46	50	55	59	59	60	60	66	71
Sun	76	80	84	75	66	42	19	17	15	12	10	18	26	33	40	47	52	56	60	61	61	62	67	72

Every cell shows its own index from 0 to 100, so the table reads without relying on colour. 100 is the strongest hour of this platform's week, not a percentage.

Best three slots of the week

Wed at 2amindex 100
Thu at 2amindex 98
Wed at 1amindex 95

Top three hours, day by day

Mon2am, 1am, 12am
Tue2am, 1am, 11pm
Wed2am, 1am, 12am
Thu2am, 1am, 12am
Fri2am, 1am, 12am
Sat2am, 1am, 12am
Sun2am, 1am, 12am

What this is, and what it is not

These are population averages for TikTok across many accounts and niches (Aggregated 2025-2026 studies; evening peaks, weak weekday effect.). They are a reasonable starting point when you have no data of your own, and nothing more than that.

Your own audience beats every number on this page. A B2B account and a teen-facing account genuinely peak at different hours, and once you have a few weeks of posts your analytics will say so. OctoSpark schedules against your own posting history rather than a benchmark.

How to use the TikTok heatmap

Of every platform on this site, TikTok is the one where the hour matters least. Use the grid to rule out obviously dead slots rather than to hunt for a perfect one.

Set the timezone control to wherever the bulk of your audience lives. If that is not where you live, resist the pull of your own clock: you are scheduling around their day, not yours.
Read the bands rather than the digits. The scale is relative, with the busiest cell of the week fixed at 100, so the gap between a 78 and an 81 is noise and the gap between a 78 and a 30 is not.
Shortlist two or three candidate slots out of the warm band instead of one. A single slot gives you nothing to compare itself against.
Switch to a business or creator account if you have not already. TikTok analytics then report follower activity by hour and by day, which replaces this grid with something measured from your own followers.
Give each candidate a month and at least ten videos before you read anything into it. TikTok view counts are skewed enough that a handful of posts per slot is an anecdote rather than a sample.
Compare on the median post, not the best one. A single outlier proves nothing about a slot, and on TikTok it is the typical post that tells you whether the slot is working.

How TikTok actually distributes a new post

TikTok opens on the For You feed, and that feed is built from recommendations rather than from who you follow. That single design choice is why publishing time carries less weight here than anywhere else on this site.

A Following feed and a Friends feed exist, but neither is where the app opens. A large share of your views come from people who have never seen you before, selected by the recommender rather than by a timeline.
TikTok’s own published explanation of the For You feed lists user interactions, video information such as captions and sounds, and device and account settings as the inputs. Follower count is explicitly not treated as a direct ranking factor.
Because distribution is recommendation-led, a video can sit quiet for days and then pick up. Any slot test that reads the numbers after a single evening will draw the wrong conclusion.
What the hour actually buys you is the first test audience. Publish while your own followers are asleep and the earliest signal the recommender gets is thin, which is a real effect but a modest one.

What this heatmap cannot tell you

This heatmap is a population average dressed up as a grid, and on TikTok in particular it is the weakest of the evidence available to you.

The curve behind the grid is drawn through a handful of published peak hours and weekday weights, then interpolated across all 168 cells. The smoothness is an artefact of the drawing, not a measurement.
Numbers are relative to the busiest cell of the week, which is fixed at 100. They are not percentages, engagement rates or view counts, and small differences between warm cells mean nothing.
Sound and trend cycles move faster than any weekly benchmark. A sound that is peaking this week will outweigh the difference between a 9pm and a 10pm slot by a wide margin.
Aggregate studies pool niches with completely different sleep patterns. A late-night humour account and a revision-tips account genuinely do not share a peak.

Better levers than the posting slot on TikTok

On a recommendation feed the first second or two of the video decides almost everything. Retention and rewatches are what the recommender responds to, and no amount of slot tuning compensates for a video people scroll past.

Post more often rather than more precisely. Volume gives the recommender more chances to find an audience, and it gives you a larger sample to judge slots from later.
Measure a video over at least a week. Judging TikTok performance on the first evening confuses a slow start with a failure, and slow starts are normal here.
Once follower-activity data exists in your own analytics, stop using this grid. It was only ever a stand-in for the thing you now have.

The rest of the job

You just fixed one post. Now do the month.

The best time to post on tiktok solves one piece of one post. OctoSpark plans, writes and schedules the whole calendar across every network you use, publishes it for you, and reports what actually performed.

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Frequently asked questions

How this tool works, what it cannot do, and what happens to what you put into it.

When is the best time to post on TikTok?
TikTok peaks in the evening, roughly 6pm to 10pm, and the weekday effect is weak. That is what the aggregate studies show, and this page converts those windows into your own timezone so you are not mentally subtracting hours from an American article.
Which timezone is the benchmark in?
The underlying figures are published in US Central time (America/Chicago). The heatmap shifts every cell into whichever timezone you pick at the top, so the hours you read are the hours on your clock.
Does posting time still matter now feeds are algorithmic?
Less than it did, but it still matters. A recommendation feed can surface a post hours or days later, so timing no longer decides reach on its own. What it still does is decide who sees it in the first hour, and early engagement is one of the signals the ranking uses, so a good slot helps, and a consistent schedule helps more.
Should I trust this over my own analytics?
No. This is a population average across many accounts and niches, which is a reasonable starting point when you have no data of your own. Once you have a few weeks of posts, your own audience beats every benchmark on this page: a B2B account and a teen-facing account genuinely peak at different hours.
Is my data private?
Yes. This tool does its work in your browser, so whatever you type, paste or upload stays on your device. Nothing is sent to our servers, which is also why it keeps working if you go offline after the page has loaded.
Is this really free?
Yes. Every tool here is free with no account, no credit card and no usage cap. They exist so that the people who need our scheduling product find us, which only works if the tools are genuinely useful on their own.
Do I need an account?
No. Open the page and use it. An account is only for OctoSpark itself, where you plan, schedule and publish a whole calendar rather than fixing one post at a time.
Can I use the output commercially?
Yes. Anything you produce here is yours, including for client and commercial work. We claim no rights over it and we do not watermark it.

Day	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23
Mon	77	82	86	77	67	43	20	18	16	13	11	19	28	35	43	51	55	60	64	65	66	66	72	77
Tue	83	87	92	82	72	46	22	20	17	14	12	21	30	38	47	55	60	65	70	71	71	72	78	84
Wed	90	95	100	89	78	50	22	19	17	14	12	21	29	38	46	54	59	64	69	69	70	71	76	82
Thu	88	93	98	87	76	49	21	19	16	14	11	20	28	36	44	52	57	62	66	67	68	68	74	80
Fri	86	90	95	85	74	48	20	18	15	13	11	19	27	35	42	50	54	59	63	64	64	65	70	76
Sat	81	86	90	80	70	45	18	16	14	12	10	18	25	32	39	46	50	55	59	59	60	60	66	71
Sun	76	80	84	75	66	42	19	17	15	12	10	18	26	33	40	47	52	56	60	61	61	62	67	72

Day	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23
Mon	77	82	86	77	67	43	20	18	16	13	11	19	28	35	43	51	55	60	64	65	66	66	72	77
Tue	83	87	92	82	72	46	22	20	17	14	12	21	30	38	47	55	60	65	70	71	71	72	78	84
Wed	90	95	100	89	78	50	22	19	17	14	12	21	29	38	46	54	59	64	69	69	70	71	76	82
Thu	88	93	98	87	76	49	21	19	16	14	11	20	28	36	44	52	57	62	66	67	68	68	74	80
Fri	86	90	95	85	74	48	20	18	15	13	11	19	27	35	42	50	54	59	63	64	64	65	70	76
Sat	81	86	90	80	70	45	18	16	14	12	10	18	25	32	39	46	50	55	59	59	60	60	66	71
Sun	76	80	84	75	66	42	19	17	15	12	10	18	26	33	40	47	52	56	60	61	61	62	67	72