The best time to post on Instagram on Sunday

Ask the main Instagram studies about Sunday and you get four answers: midday, evening, the small hours and “don’t bother.” Hootsuite’s best Sunday window is 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. Buffer’s best hour is 9 p.m., with 10 p.m. and 8 p.m. close behind. Later’s 2024 data picks 12 a.m., 5 a.m. and 11 p.m. Sprout Social finds no Sunday peak at all.

The sharpest clash is Sunday night. Hootsuite says to stop posting after 9 p.m., when people are logging off and getting ready for the week. Buffer’s best Sunday hour is exactly 9 p.m., and it paints the same scene, people winding down before Monday, except that in its numbers they are still scrolling. Same evening, opposite advice.

That depends on which study you trust. Buffer and Later both rank Sunday above at least one other day and still name good Sunday hours. Sprout Social is the pessimist, and its industry breakdowns agree: retail, travel, tech, healthcare, government, nonprofits and financial services all list weekends as their worst days. Its note for retailers is blunt: wait until Sunday to post and you miss the weekday lunch-break shoppers entirely.

Averages blend millions of posts from very different accounts. An account whose followers do something particular on Sundays can break the pattern: meal-prep recipes for the week ahead, weekly planners, a Sunday market, a match-day crowd, a place of worship. For accounts like these, Sunday may be the best day of the week, and only their own numbers will show it.

Tip: A fair Sunday test: post the same kind of content on a Sunday and on a Wednesday for four weeks, then compare engagement per account reached two days after each post. If Sunday keeps losing, move that post to the weekday.

Instagram records when your followers are online. From your profile, open the Professional dashboard, tap Total followers and scroll to Most active times. Look at the days first: if Sunday’s bar is as tall as your weekdays, the gloomy averages don’t describe your audience. Then check Sunday’s hours to see whether your followers peak around lunch, like Hootsuite’s sample, or late in the evening, like Buffer’s.

A tall bar shows that people are on the app, not that they will like or comment, so it tells you which Sunday hour to test first rather than which one will win.

All four studies give times in the audience’s local time, so 12 p.m. means noon where your followers are. What Sunday means varies more. In Israel the working week starts on Sunday, and Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait take Friday and Saturday off, so Sunday there is an ordinary working day. The UAE moved its weekend to Saturday and Sunday in 2022. Advice that assumes Sunday is a lazy day off won’t fit followers in those countries.

India keeps Sunday as its weekly day off and doesn’t change its clocks, so for Indian followers Buffer’s slot is simply 9 p.m. IST. Audiences spread across countries take a little arithmetic. A Sunday post at 3 p.m. in New York goes out at 8 p.m. in London for most of the year: the end of Hootsuite’s midday window for American followers, and one of Buffer’s top evening hours for British ones.

You don’t need to be at your phone at 9 p.m. on a Sunday. Professional accounts can schedule posts and Reels inside the Instagram app, and Meta Business Suite can schedule them too.

Most replies can wait until Monday morning. A public reply to a comment has no deadline, and Meta’s rules let a business tool send a private reply to a comment for up to 7 days after it was posted. Direct messages are stricter for tools that reply through Meta’s API: they have 24 hours from the person’s last message (7 days for support handled by a real person), so an automated answer to a question sent at 10 p.m. on Sunday must go out by 10 p.m. on Monday.