The Best Time to Post on LinkedIn in 2026 (By Day and Content Type)

Everyone wants to know the best time to post on LinkedIn. Google it and you'll find dozens of articles all saying the same thing: Tuesday at 10am. Or Wednesday at 8am. Or some other generic answer with no data behind it.

We actually have the data. 10,222 posts from 494 creators. Every post timestamped. Every engagement metric tracked.

The answers are more interesting than you'd expect. Some of them are counterintuitive. One of them might make you rethink your entire posting schedule. (That one's about Sunday. Stay with me.)

The Data: Engagement Rate by Day

Here's how each day of the week performs based on average engagement rate across our full dataset:

Tuesday is the clear winner at 0.92%. Saturday is the clear loser at 0.46%. That's a 2x difference in engagement rate just based on when you hit publish.

Let that sink in. Same content. Same creator. Same audience. But posting on Tuesday instead of Saturday doubles your engagement rate. That's the easiest performance lever you'll ever find.

If you do nothing else after reading this article, move your best content to Tuesday.

Pro tip: "But David, I've been posting on Wednesdays for months." That's fine. Wednesday isn't bad. But if you have a post you're particularly proud of, one where you spent extra time on the hook and the insights are genuinely fresh, give it the Tuesday slot. Save your B-material for the other days.

The Sunday Surprise

Here's the counterintuitive finding that most timing guides miss entirely. It's the kind of data point that makes you stare at the spreadsheet and wonder if something's broken.

Sunday has the highest raw engagement of any day. 377 average likes. 69 average comments. Both numbers beat every weekday.

But wait, Sunday's engagement rate is only 0.55%. How can it have the highest raw numbers but a mediocre rate?

The answer is competition. Fewer people post on Sunday. Way fewer. That means the posts that do go up face less competition in the feed. They get more visibility per post. More eyeballs per impression.

But the total audience is smaller on Sunday. Fewer people are scrolling LinkedIn on their day off. (Though "fewer" is relative. Plenty of professionals check LinkedIn on Sunday evening, often while mentally preparing for the week ahead. Or avoiding mentally preparing for the week ahead, which amounts to the same thing.)

So the engagement rate (which factors in the smaller total pool) looks lower. But the absolute numbers per post are higher.

What does this mean for you? If you post on Sunday, each individual post is likely to get more engagement than a weekday post. But the ceiling is lower because the audience is smaller.

Sunday is the high-floor, lower-ceiling day. Your worst Sunday post probably does better than your worst Tuesday post. But your best Tuesday post probably beats your best Sunday post.

Pro tip: Sunday is the perfect day for the posts you're less sure about. Got a personal reflection you're nervous to share? A slightly unconventional take you're not sure will land? An experimental format you want to test? Sunday is your sandbox. The low competition means decent engagement even if the content isn't your strongest, and the smaller audience means if it doesn't work, fewer people see the miss.

Why Sunday Works: The Psychology

There's something else going on with Sunday that the data doesn't capture directly but that experienced LinkedIn creators will confirm.

People scroll differently on Sunday. On Tuesday morning, they're scanning quickly between meetings. The thumb is moving fast. Attention is split. On Sunday evening, they're on the couch, slightly bored, maybe procrastinating about the week ahead. The scroll is slower. The reading is deeper. The comments are longer.

This means Sunday posts tend to generate higher-quality engagement. Not just more likes, but more thoughtful comments. And since LinkedIn's algorithm weights comment depth and comment replies heavily, a Sunday post with 15 long comments can distribute as well as a Tuesday post with 30 short ones.

Pro tip: If you post on Sunday, match the tone to the audience's mindset. Sunday LinkedIn readers are in reflective mode, not execution mode. Career reflections, leadership lessons, personal stories, "here's what I've been thinking about" posts. Save the tactical frameworks for Tuesday.

Wednesday: The "Like But Don't Comment" Day

Wednesday sits at 0.65% engagement rate, which is middle of the pack. But it has the highest average likes of any weekday at 326.

People like stuff on Wednesday. They just don't comment much.

This might be a mid-week energy thing. Wednesday is the busiest day for most professionals. They're scrolling LinkedIn between meetings, double-tapping likes quickly, but they don't have the bandwidth to stop and write a thoughtful comment. It's the "I see you, I appreciate you, but I genuinely do not have 45 seconds to formulate a sentence right now" day.

If you're posting content that's designed for saves and likes rather than deep discussion (think checklists, frameworks, cheat sheets), Wednesday is a solid choice. You'll get the visibility without needing the comments.

Pro tip: Wednesday is actually the ideal day for carousel posts and save-worthy content. Carousels don't depend on comments for distribution. They depend on swipe-through rates and dwell time. A busy professional who swipes through your entire 10-slide carousel without commenting still sends a strong signal to the algorithm. The "like and swipe" behavior that Wednesday encourages is exactly what carousels need.

The Wednesday Engagement Paradox

There's an interesting strategic implication here. Most LinkedIn advice says "optimize for comments because comments weight 8x more than likes." And that's true in general.

But on Wednesday, optimizing for comments is swimming against the tide. People don't want to comment on Wednesday. They want to like, save and move on. So instead of fighting human behavior, work with it. Post your most saveable, most likeable content on Wednesday and save your discussion-provoking, comment-generating content for Tuesday and Thursday when people actually have the mental bandwidth to type a response.

Monday: The Fresh Start Effect

Monday hits 0.72%, making it the second-best day by engagement rate. There's a psychological factor here worth noting.

Monday morning, people are in "fresh start" mode. New week, new energy, new intentions. They're more receptive to educational content, industry insights and "here's what you should focus on this week" framing.

Monday is also when people catch up on what they missed over the weekend. If you post at 8am Monday, you're one of the first things people see when they re-enter professional mode. That's a privileged position.

Pro tip: Monday is the best day for "thought leadership" content: industry predictions, contrarian takes, strategic frameworks. People are setting their professional tone for the week. They want to feel informed and ahead of the curve. Content that makes them feel smarter on Monday morning gets rewarded with engagement.

The catch with Monday is that the first hour matters even more than usual. Monday morning feeds are crowded because everyone scheduled their posts for Monday 9am. If your post doesn't generate traction in the first 60 minutes, it gets buried under the pile fast.

Match Your Content to the Right Day

Different content types need different audience behaviors. Here's how to match them.

Tuesday: Your Flagship Content

Tuesday gets a 0.92% engagement rate. This is the day to post your most important content. The stuff you spent the most time on. The original framework. The data-backed insight. The carousel you designed over the weekend.

People are settled into their week on Tuesday. They've cleared the Monday inbox backlog. They have mental bandwidth to read, think and engage. This is the day for content that demands attention.

Think of Tuesday as your content main stage. If you were performing at a festival, Tuesday is your headlining slot. Don't waste it on a repost or a quick observation. Give it your best material.

Pro tip: If you can only post twice per week, make those days Tuesday and Thursday. They're the two strongest professional engagement days and they're spaced perfectly: close enough to maintain presence, far enough apart to avoid fatigue.

Monday: Educational Content

Monday hits 0.72%. People are catching up after the weekend, re-entering professional mode. Educational content performs well here because people are in learning mode. They're planning their week, looking for ideas, open to new information.

Good Monday content: industry insights, weekly roundups, "here's what you should know this week" posts. Content that helps someone feel prepared for the week ahead.

Pro tip: "Monday motivation" is one of the most mocked content categories on LinkedIn, and deservedly so. But the instinct behind it isn't wrong. People do want to feel motivated on Monday morning. The issue is execution. Don't post a sunset photo with "Believe in yourself." Instead, share a specific lesson from your own week with a concrete takeaway. That's Monday motivation that actually adds value.

Thursday: Data and Insights

Thursday sits at 0.71%. It's solidly professional. By Thursday, people are deep into their work week and thinking about results, metrics, outcomes. This is a strong day for data-driven posts, case studies and specific tactical advice.

Thursday also benefits from a "results mindset." People are looking at their weekly goals, assessing what's working and what isn't. Content that provides actionable data or specific optimization tactics resonates with this mindset.

Pro tip: Thursday is an underrated day for "contrarian data" posts. "Everyone says X, but here's what the data actually shows." When people are in analytical mode, they're more receptive to having assumptions challenged. A post that would get dismissed on Friday afternoon ("sure, whatever") gets seriously engaged with on Thursday morning ("wait, really? show me the data").

Friday: Lighter Content

Friday comes in at 0.69%. People are winding down. Heavy, long-form content underperforms on Fridays because attention spans are shorter. Lighter posts work better: quick tips, relatable observations, a bit of humor.

Friday is the day LinkedIn starts to feel slightly less corporate. People are mentally half out the door. They want to smile, not study. A post that makes someone genuinely laugh on Friday afternoon gets shared more than a deeply insightful post that requires 3 minutes of concentrated reading.

Pro tip: Friday is the best day for "relatable professional humor" content. "Things every [job title] is tired of hearing." "The five stages of reviewing a strategy deck." "A completely accurate chart of my productivity by hour." These posts get high engagement on Friday because they match the audience's mood.

Another pro tip: If your industry has a weekly news cycle, Friday afternoon is a strong time for "weekly recap" posts. "Here's what happened in [industry] this week: three things that matter and two things that don't." People want to feel caught up before the weekend. Give them a shortcut.

Sunday: Experimental and Personal Content

Sunday's mix of high raw engagement and low competition makes it the perfect day for experiments. Got a post you're not sure about? Try it on Sunday. The low-risk, decent-reward profile means you'll still get solid engagement even if the content isn't your best.

Personal stories tend to do especially well on Sunday. People are in a more reflective, personal headspace. They're not in "work mode." Family stories, career reflections, life lessons. These are Sunday posts.

Pro tip: Sunday evening (between 5pm and 8pm in your audience's timezone) is the sweet spot. People are transitioning from weekend mode to work-brain mode. They're on their phones, scrolling through LinkedIn as a way to ease back into professional thinking. They're relaxed enough to read something personal but professional enough to engage meaningfully.

Saturday: Skip It (Mostly)

Saturday pulls a 0.46% engagement rate. The worst by a significant margin. People are offline. They're not thinking about LinkedIn. Unless you're specifically targeting an international audience in a different timezone, Saturday is a waste of your best content.

If you absolutely must post seven days a week, save your lowest-effort content for Saturday. A quick observation, a reshare with a brief comment, a "thought of the day" type post. Nothing you spent more than 10 minutes on.

Pro tip: There's one exception to the "skip Saturday" rule. If your audience includes a high percentage of founders and entrepreneurs, Saturday can work. Founders work weekends. They check LinkedIn on Saturday because they don't have a clear work/life divide. If your analytics show decent Saturday engagement, your audience might be founder-heavy, and that's actually useful audience intelligence.

The Golden Hour: Why Your First 60 Minutes Matter

When you post matters, but what happens immediately after you post matters even more.

LinkedIn's algorithm works in distribution tiers. Your post first goes to a small test group, usually 5-10% of your followers and connections. The algorithm watches how that group responds.

If engagement is strong in the first 60 minutes (people reading, liking, commenting), the algorithm pushes the post wider. Second-degree connections. Topic feeds. The broader network.

If the first hour is quiet, the post dies. It barely reaches beyond the initial test group. It's like a pilot episode that doesn't get picked up: the network saw the first screening numbers and decided not to distribute further.

This means the best "time" to post is whatever time maximizes the chance of strong first-hour engagement. For most professional audiences, that's 8-10am in your audience's timezone.

Why 8-10am? People check LinkedIn first thing in the morning. Before the meetings start. During breakfast. On the commute. This is peak scroll time on the platform.

If your audience is in the US Eastern timezone, post at 8am ET. If your audience is in Europe, post at 8am CET. If your audience is spread across multiple timezones, favor the timezone where the bulk of your audience lives.

Publishing at 3pm means your post sits in the queue while your audience is in back-to-back meetings. By the time they open LinkedIn at 6pm, your post is already 3 hours old and the algorithm has moved on.

Pro tip: Post at 7:30-8:00am, not 9:00am. Most creators schedule for 9am because it feels like "business hours." This means 9am is congested. Posting 30-60 minutes earlier means you're in the feed before the flood. Early bird advantage is real on LinkedIn, which might be the only context where that cliche actually applies.

The First-Hour Engagement Strategy

Knowing the golden hour exists is one thing. Actively maximizing it is another. Here's how:

Don't post and ghost. The worst thing you can do is publish at 8am and then go into a meeting until 10am. If you can't be active in the first hour after posting, post at a time when you can be.

Reply to every early comment immediately. The first 3-5 comments on your post are critical. Reply to each one with a follow-up question or additional insight. This turns each comment into a thread, which multiplies the engagement signals the algorithm sees.

Engage with other posts before and after publishing. Spend 10 minutes engaging with other people's content right before you publish. This signals to the algorithm that you're an active participant (not just a broadcaster), which can improve initial distribution.

Pro tip: Some creators keep a "first responder" list: 5-10 connections who consistently engage early. They don't ask for engagement (that's pod behavior). Instead, they make sure to share their new post in a DM with a note like "Would love your perspective on this one." A genuine request for input, not a demand for a like. The distinction matters.

Does Timing Vary by Content Format?

Yes, but not as much as you'd think.

Image posts (including carousels) in our data average 0.93% engagement rate across all days. Text posts average 0.50%. That gap holds relatively steady regardless of when you publish.

In other words, image posts outperform text posts on every day of the week. The format advantage is consistent. Tuesday image post beats Tuesday text post. Sunday image post beats Sunday text post. The pattern doesn't change.

That said, timing sensitivity is higher for text posts. A text post published on Saturday might get half the engagement of the same post published on Tuesday. But an image post published on Saturday still performs decently because the visual stops the scroll regardless of when it appears.

If you're posting text-only content, timing matters a lot. Get it on Tuesday or Monday.

If you're posting images or carousels, timing still matters but you have more flexibility. The format itself is doing heavy lifting. Think of carousels as all-weather content: they perform reasonably well no matter when you publish them, whereas text posts are more weather-dependent.

Pro tip: If you create carousels and text posts, here's the optimal combo: publish your carousel on Tuesday (best day + best format = maximum performance) and your text posts on Thursday and Monday. This gives you format variety across the week while putting each type on a day that suits it.

The Format-Day Matrix

If you want to get granular, here's how to think about format and timing together:

"Best" means optimal combination. "Great" means particularly strong synergy (Wednesday + carousel is the save-worthy combo). "Risky" means the format-day combo is weaker (text posts on Friday compete for diminished attention).

The "Consistency Beats Timing" Rule

Here's what most timing optimization articles won't tell you: the difference between posting at the right time and the wrong time is maybe 2x on engagement rate. The difference between posting consistently and not posting at all is infinite.

A creator who posts every Wednesday at 2pm (not optimal) will massively outperform a creator who posts once a month on the "perfect" Tuesday at 9am.

LinkedIn's algorithm rewards consistency. Regular posters get gradually increasing baseline distribution. The algorithm learns that your audience engages with your content, so it shows your posts to more people over time.

This is the compounding effect. Week 1, your post reaches 500 people. Week 4, same quality post reaches 700. Week 12, it reaches 1,200. You didn't do anything different. The algorithm just started trusting that your content generates engagement.

If you can only focus on one thing, focus on posting three times per week at roughly the same times. That habit alone puts you ahead of 80% of LinkedIn users. The ones who post sporadically, disappear for two weeks, come back with a burst, then disappear again. The algorithm doesn't reward bursts. It rewards reliability.

Pro tip: Use a scheduling tool. Buffer, Hootsuite, LinkedIn's native scheduler, whatever works for you. The "best" posting time is useless if you forget to post. Schedule your week's content on Sunday evening (while you're in that reflective Sunday mode) and let it run automatically. This removes willpower from the equation entirely.

The Ideal Weekly Schedule

Based on our data, here's the posting schedule that maximizes engagement:

Three posts per week (minimum recommended):

• Tuesday morning: your best content (highest engagement day)
• Thursday morning: data or insights (strong professional day)
• Sunday evening: personal story or experimental content (low competition, high raw engagement)

Five posts per week (ambitious but effective):

• Monday morning: educational or news-related content
• Tuesday morning: flagship content (carousel, framework, original insight)
• Wednesday morning: save-worthy content (checklist, cheat sheet, quick tip)
• Thursday morning: data-driven or tactical content
• Sunday evening: personal story or reflection

Skip Saturday. If you're posting seven days a week, Saturday is where you put your lowest priority content.

Pro tip: Don't try to jump from zero posts per week to five. Start with two (Tuesday and Thursday). Get consistent. After a month, add Sunday. After another month, add Monday or Wednesday. Build the habit gradually. Five posts per week sounds easy until you're staring at a blank screen on Wednesday morning with nothing to say.

The "Good Enough" Schedule

Here's a secret about posting schedules: the perfect schedule that you don't follow is worse than an imperfect schedule that you do.

If Tuesday morning doesn't work for you because you have a standing 8am meeting every Tuesday, post on Wednesday. If Sunday feels wrong because you genuinely disconnect on weekends, post Monday and Thursday instead.

The data gives you guidelines, not commandments. The best schedule is the one that fits your life while hitting at least three days per week.

One More Thing: Timezone Math

A common mistake is thinking about "the best time" without specifying whose timezone.

If you post at 9am in San Francisco, it's noon in New York and 6pm in London. You're catching east coasters at lunch and missing most European professionals entirely.

Check your LinkedIn analytics to see where your audience is concentrated. If 70% of your followers are in North America, optimize for Eastern Time. If you're split 50/50 between the US and Europe, 6-7am Pacific (9-10am Eastern, 3-4pm Central European) gives you overlap with both.

There's no universally perfect time. There's only the best time for YOUR audience.

Pro tip: If you have a truly global audience, consider posting at 6am Pacific / 9am Eastern / 2pm GMT. This catches early-morning Americans, mid-morning East Coasters and afternoon Europeans. It misses Asia entirely, but unless your audience is specifically Asia-focused, this is the best single-time compromise for a global reach.

Another pro tip: LinkedIn's native analytics will show you where your followers are located, but it doesn't show you when they're active. For that, you need to experiment. Try posting at different times for two weeks each and compare engagement rates. Your data trumps anyone else's generalizations, including ours.

The Remote Work Factor

It's 2026. A lot of professionals don't have a traditional 9-5 schedule anymore. Remote workers check LinkedIn in patterns that don't match the old "commute and lunch break" model.

Many remote workers check LinkedIn first thing in the morning (before "opening" their laptop for work), during a mid-morning break (10-11am) and in the early evening (5-7pm). These three windows create an extended "prime time" that's broader than the traditional 8-10am slot.

If your audience is heavily remote (tech, marketing, consulting), your timing window is more forgiving. If your audience is more traditional (finance, legal, healthcare), the 8-10am window is still your best bet.

Stop Overthinking, Start Posting

The biggest trap with timing optimization is spending more time worrying about when to post than actually creating good content. The irony of reading a 4,000-word article about posting times when you could have written two LinkedIn posts in that time is not lost on me.

The data is clear: Tuesday is the best day. Saturday is the worst. Sunday is surprisingly strong for raw engagement. Morning beats afternoon. The first hour matters most.

Now you know. Adjust your schedule accordingly and then focus your energy on the content itself. A great post at a mediocre time will always outperform a mediocre post at the perfect time.

Pro tip: Here's the ultimate framework for timing decisions. Spend 5% of your LinkedIn effort on timing optimization and 95% on content quality. If you're spending more than 5 minutes deciding when to post, you're spending too much. Pick a time, post it, move on. The content does the heavy lifting. The timing is just a small multiplier on top.

The creators who obsess over timing are usually avoiding the harder question: "Is my content actually good?" Timing is a comfortable optimization because it's purely mechanical. Content quality is harder because it requires honesty, creativity and vulnerability.

Get the timing roughly right (weekday mornings, favor Tuesday) and then pour all your remaining energy into saying something worth reading. That's the formula. It's not complicated. It's just hard to do consistently. Which is exactly why the people who do it consistently win.

---

Data from ViralBrain's analysis of 10,222 LinkedIn posts across 494 creators. ViralBrain shows you exactly when your audience is most active and helps you schedule content for maximum impact.