Free data study · 29,808 Reels

Best Time to Post on Instagram

Across 29,808 creator Reels we analyzed, Saturday evening around 8pm ET was the single strongest window — roughly 2.4× the typical post's median plays — with weekend nights and early weekday mornings (around 6am ET) close behind. The full hour-by-hour heatmap is below.

Median views by posting hour · 29,808 Instagram Reels · US Eastern time

Updated 2026-07-06

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Fewer viewsMore views

Strongest windows (median-view index, 100 = typical)

Saturday 8pm ET×2.4Saturday 6am ET×2.2Saturday 12am ET×2.0Sunday 12am ET×2.0Monday 6am ET×1.9Friday 6am ET×1.9

Method: upload times are derived from each video's post ID, converted to US Eastern, and bucketed by weekday and hour; each bucket shows the median view count indexed to the platform-wide median. Buckets with under 50 posts are greyed out. Views accumulate over a post's lifetime, so read this as where performance concentrates across a large sample — not a per-post guarantee.

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How did we find the best posting times?

Instead of recycling other articles, we measured: tens of thousands of real creator Reels, exact upload times decoded from Instagram's own media IDs, and median plays per hour bucket.

  1. Exact upload times from media IDs

    Instagram media IDs encode their creation timestamp. We decoded 29,808 Reels and converted to US Eastern time.

  2. Median plays per weekday-hour bucket

    Each weekly hour-slot gets the median play count of Reels posted in it, indexed to the platform-wide median (100 = typical).

  3. Honest sample sizes

    Buckets with fewer than 50 Reels are greyed out. The analysis refreshes quarterly as the corpus grows.

Timing is a multiplier; creators are the engine. Octohog finds the UGC creators already performing in your niche — with the evidence attached. See Creator Match

Questions

Asked, answered, on the record.

  • In our 29,808-Reel sample: Saturday around 8pm ET led at about 2.4× typical median plays, followed by weekend late nights (midnight ET), and 6am ET on Monday and Friday. Early-morning slots likely benefit from thinner competition ahead of the morning scroll.

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