When is the best time to post on YouTube?

YouTube rewards publishing a few hours before the evening watch window, weekends too. 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.

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Best time to post on YouTube

YouTube rewards publishing a few hours before the evening watch window, weekends too. 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:Sat 12amabout 34h 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	94	89	85	68	52	28	11	11	11	10	10	10	17	24	31	37	43	49	55	61	67	73	78	80
Tue	82	78	74	59	45	25	12	12	11	11	11	10	18	25	33	39	45	52	58	64	71	76	82	84
Wed	86	82	77	62	47	26	13	12	12	12	11	11	19	26	34	41	47	54	61	67	74	80	86	88
Thu	90	86	81	65	50	27	13	13	13	12	12	11	20	28	36	43	50	57	64	71	78	84	90	93
Fri	95	90	86	69	52	28	14	14	13	13	12	12	21	29	38	45	53	60	67	75	82	89	95	98
Sat	100	95	90	73	55	30	14	13	13	13	12	12	20	29	37	44	52	59	66	73	80	87	93	96
Sun	98	93	88	71	54	29	13	13	12	12	12	11	19	28	36	43	50	56	63	70	77	83	89	92

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

Sat at 12amindex 100
Sun at 12amindex 98
Fri at 11pmindex 98

Top three hours, day by day

Mon12am, 1am, 2am
Tue11pm, 12am, 10pm
Wed11pm, 12am, 10pm
Thu11pm, 12am, 10pm
Fri11pm, 12am, 10pm
Sat12am, 11pm, 1am
Sun12am, 1am, 11pm

What this is, and what it is not

These are population averages for YouTube across many accounts and niches (Aggregated 2025-2026 studies; publish before the evening watch peak.). 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 YouTube heatmap

YouTube is the odd one out on this page. A video is not competing for a moment in a feed, it is being made available ahead of a watch session, so read the grid as when your audience is watching rather than when you should be uploading.

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.
Use scheduled publishing instead of uploading live. Upload and let the video process hours ahead, then have it go public in the slot you chose, which also leaves you time to swap a thumbnail before anyone has seen it.
Judge each candidate on views at 28 days rather than on the first evening, and expect the whole test to take a couple of months. Anything shorter is measuring the notification bump instead of the video.
Compare on the median post, not the best one. A single outlier proves nothing about a slot, and on YouTube it is the typical post that tells you whether the slot is working.

How YouTube actually distributes a new post

YouTube views arrive over days and months, mostly from browse and suggested placements rather than from subscriptions, and that changes what a publishing time can possibly do for you.

YouTube Studio already answers this question with your own data. Analytics, then Audience, shows when your viewers are on YouTube as an hour-by-weekday chart built from your channel, which is precisely what this generic grid is approximating.
The subscriptions feed is a minority traffic source for most channels. Suggested videos and the home page carry the load, and neither of them cares much which hour you published in.
Publishing a little before your audience’s watch peak is the actual mechanism behind the usual advice: the video needs to exist, finish processing and be available by the time people sit down to watch.
Shorts run on a separate recommendation surface with an even longer tail than long-form video. If your channel is mostly Shorts, the timing question is closer to TikTok’s than to YouTube’s.

What this heatmap cannot tell you

The idea that there is a correct minute to publish a YouTube video is the least defensible version of this advice anywhere on this site.

A video’s life is measured in months. The publishing slot influences the first day and has almost no bearing on where the video ends up, which is the number that actually matters to you.
The grid is interpolated from published peak windows and weekday weights, then normalised so the busiest cell reads 100. It is not a measurement of your channel, or of any single channel.
Your Studio data beats this page outright. If the channel has any history at all, the audience tab supersedes everything in this grid and you should use that instead.
The weekend weighting is genuine but blunt. Longer watch sessions at the weekend favour longer videos, and a short weekday-facing video does not inherit that benefit.

What to optimise instead of the upload hour

Thumbnail and title decide the click, and retention decides whether YouTube keeps offering the video to anybody. Both outrank the hour by a distance that is not close.

Publish to a regular day rather than a regular hour. Predictability trains returning viewers, and returning viewers are a stronger signal than a well-chosen slot.
Give a video days before you judge it. A first-day view count on YouTube is a poor predictor of where that video finally lands.
If a video is tied to an event, publish early enough to be indexed before the search interest arrives. That is one of the few cases where the clock genuinely decides the outcome.

The rest of the job

You just fixed one post. Now do the month.

The best time to post on youtube 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.

One calendar for every network
Schedule once, publish everywhere
Drafts written in your own voice
See what actually performed

Open the full sign-up page

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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 YouTube?
YouTube rewards publishing a few hours before the evening watch window, weekends too. 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	94	89	85	68	52	28	11	11	11	10	10	10	17	24	31	37	43	49	55	61	67	73	78	80
Tue	82	78	74	59	45	25	12	12	11	11	11	10	18	25	33	39	45	52	58	64	71	76	82	84
Wed	86	82	77	62	47	26	13	12	12	12	11	11	19	26	34	41	47	54	61	67	74	80	86	88
Thu	90	86	81	65	50	27	13	13	13	12	12	11	20	28	36	43	50	57	64	71	78	84	90	93
Fri	95	90	86	69	52	28	14	14	13	13	12	12	21	29	38	45	53	60	67	75	82	89	95	98
Sat	100	95	90	73	55	30	14	13	13	13	12	12	20	29	37	44	52	59	66	73	80	87	93	96
Sun	98	93	88	71	54	29	13	13	12	12	12	11	19	28	36	43	50	56	63	70	77	83	89	92

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	94	89	85	68	52	28	11	11	11	10	10	10	17	24	31	37	43	49	55	61	67	73	78	80
Tue	82	78	74	59	45	25	12	12	11	11	11	10	18	25	33	39	45	52	58	64	71	76	82	84
Wed	86	82	77	62	47	26	13	12	12	12	11	11	19	26	34	41	47	54	61	67	74	80	86	88
Thu	90	86	81	65	50	27	13	13	13	12	12	11	20	28	36	43	50	57	64	71	78	84	90	93
Fri	95	90	86	69	52	28	14	14	13	13	12	12	21	29	38	45	53	60	67	75	82	89	95	98
Sat	100	95	90	73	55	30	14	13	13	13	12	12	20	29	37	44	52	59	66	73	80	87	93	96
Sun	98	93	88	71	54	29	13	13	12	12	12	11	19	28	36	43	50	56	63	70	77	83	89	92