When is the best time to post on Facebook?

The clash is stark. Sprout Social’s best hours on Tuesday and Wednesday run from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m., while Buffer’s data marks 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. as the weakest part of the day. Hootsuite’s top slot, 5 a.m. on Tuesday, is earlier than anything Sprout Social recommends.

Some of the gap comes from what each one counted. Buffer ranked 14 million posts by engagement: reactions, comments and shares. Sprout Social counted engagements between late November 2025 and late February 2026, a sample that spans the December holidays. Hootsuite’s Facebook report came out in November 2025, which makes it the oldest of the three. Each one blends thousands of Pages with different audiences, and no study can see who follows your Page.

Tip: Don’t pick the study you like best. Take one slot from each and test them against each other on your Page.

Sprout Social’s 2026 guide points to the Planner in Meta Business Suite, where an Active times view shows when your audience was online over the past seven days. Meta often renames and moves Business Suite menus, so if you can’t see it for your Page, work from your own post results instead.

Treat the seven-day view with care. A holiday week or one post that spreads widely can distort it, so look at it across two or three ordinary weeks before you plan around it.

Your post history is the other source. Go through your last 20 or 30 posts, note the day, hour and reach of each, and see whether the best ones cluster. A cluster in your own data beats any industry average.

Pick slots the studies disagree about and give each a fair run. Post in every slot once a week for four weeks, rotate the content type between slots so the format doesn’t decide the result, and record each post’s numbers three days after it goes up.

Tip: Compare reactions, comments and shares per person reached, not raw totals. A post that reached twice as many people will usually collect more of everything.

All three studies report local time. Sprout Social lists its times in local time, Buffer says its recommended times need no conversion, and Hootsuite localised its data across 118 countries. So use the clock where most of your Page’s followers live, not the one on your desk.

Pages with followers in two countries need one more step. A shop selling to both the UAE and India could post at 9 a.m. in Dubai, which is 10:30 a.m. in India. Both are morning slots, and neither country changes its clocks, so the gap stays the same all year.

Neither Buffer’s nor Hootsuite’s Facebook study gives separate times for Reels, and Hootsuite’s doesn’t cover Groups either. If most of your reach comes from Reels or a Group, test those on their own instead of borrowing Page post times. Hootsuite does split its data by industry, with separate windows for 13 industries that differ from one to the next, which is one more reason to trust your own numbers over a headline time.