The best time to post carousels on Instagram: 7 studies compared

Each row is one study's headline best time, as published: local time for the first six, US Eastern for Eden. Green is "best". The red band is the window Sprout Social calls a dead zone.

The sharpest clash: Later calls 5 AM the best time to post, and Sprout Social tells readers to avoid "the very early or overnight 3–7 a.m. dead zone". Both say their times are in local time. They cannot both be right for the same account.

Sources: Buffer (updated September 2026), Later (April 2026), SocialPilot (February 2026), Dash Social (September 2026), Sprout Social (March 2026), Hootsuite (July 2026), Eden (August 2026).

1. Different accounts. Every study uses its own customers. Dash Social's feed data comes from 1,549 brands. Buffer's comes from 200,000+ accounts that use Buffer. A big brand's audience and a solo creator's audience are not awake at the same hours.
2. Different maths. Buffer uses the median, "to avoid skew from outlier posts and large accounts". Dash Social uses the average, which one viral post can drag up. Eden compares each post with its own creator's usual post, so big accounts cannot tilt the result. SocialPilot, Sprout Social and Hootsuite do not say exactly what they measured.
3. Different years. Later's page is dated 2026, but its feed data runs from January to October 2024.
4. "Local time" is done differently. Dash Social converts each post to its brand's time zone, and Hootsuite localised across 118 countries. Later and SocialPilot say their times are normalised but not how. Eden uses US Eastern for everyone, because "Instagram does not expose author timezones".
5. Quiet hours are thin. Far fewer posts go out at midnight than at noon, and only Eden shows how many posts fell in each slot (by day, not by hour). A slot built on fewer posts can top a chart on a small sample. That is our reading, not a finding of any study.

Most "best time" posts give one answer for every format. Three of the seven report carousels on their own, and they do not agree:

• Later: carousels do best at 5 AM, and Tuesday is their best day (Later, 2024 data).
• SocialPilot: "The best time to post Carousels on Instagram is between 7 AM and 9 AM", Tuesday to Thursday. The worst: Saturday morning, 5 to 9 AM (SocialPilot, Feb 2025 to Jan 2026).
• Buffer lists Wednesday 12 PM, Wednesday 6 PM and Thursday 9 AM for carousels, but says it analysed all post types together, so these are not carousel-only results.
• Dash Social, Sprout Social and Hootsuite report no carousel timing. Sprout says timing matters "regardless of whether you are posting a Reel, a carousel or a static image".

Eden studied nothing but carousels: 655,385 of them from 12,159 creators, each counted as a "breakout" if it earned at least twice its creator's median likes. By day, Saturday and Sunday tied for best at 28.4%; Wednesday was lowest at 26.1%. By hour, 10 PM was best (28.4%) and 4 AM worst (25.0%), with evenings from 4 PM about a point above midday (Eden).

Eden's method is the strictest of the seven for one reason: it compares each carousel with the same creator's other posts, so it is asking "does posting at 10 PM help this creator?" rather than "do accounts that post at 10 PM do better?". Its answer: a little, about 3 points.

Timing is a real signal. In his 2021 explainer, Adam Mosseri listed "what time a post was shared" among the things Feed ranking looks at, and said Feed starts from "all the recent posts shared by the people you follow" (Instagram). The same post says that by 2016 people were missing 70% of all posts in Feed. That is why Feed is ranked and not in time order.

Carousels have one advantage here. Mosseri has said that if someone sees a carousel but does not swipe, Instagram will "often give that carousel a second chance" by showing the second slide (Adam Mosseri, via Social Media Today). A carousel can get a second chance; a single image cannot. Make slide 2 a second hook.

Buffer reports that Mosseri has suggested posting 30 to 60 minutes before your audience usually comes online. Buffer also warns that the active times in Instagram Insights show when followers are on the app, which is not always when they engage.

Every study above ends with the same advice: check your own data. Here is a simple way to do it.

• Keep everything else the same: same kind of carousel, similar length, same day of the week.
• Compare shares and saves per reach, not raw likes. A post shown to more people will always get more likes.
• Use your audience's time zone, not yours, if most followers live somewhere else.
• Do not rule out the weekend. Five studies rank Saturday low, but Eden, the carousel-only study, found weekends slightly best. Try one.

Timing helps a good carousel reach the people who are awake. It cannot save a weak one. In LightFit you paste your points, every slide comes out in your name and photo, and you export PNGs ready to post at whatever hour your test picks. Lifetime access is $100 once.