Best time to post on Instagram for UK pubs and restaurants

For most UK pubs and restaurants, the best time to post on Instagram is just before people decide where to go: late morning for lunch, mid-afternoon for after-work drinks and dinner, and Thursday or Friday for weekend plans. The big published studies disagree with each other, so treat any "best time" as a starting point and test it against your own insights.

#What do the big studies say is the best time to post?

They disagree, and by a lot.

Sprout Social's 2026 analysis covers nearly 2 billion engagements across about 307,000 profiles on several networks, with peak windows measured between late November 2025 and late February 2026. For Instagram it puts the strongest windows on weekday afternoons, with Tuesday and Wednesday peaking and weekends the weakest. Its food and beverage breakdown runs from 11am to 6pm on Monday, 11am to 4pm on Tuesday, 11am to 2pm on Wednesday, and 11am to 1pm on Thursday and Friday.

Hootsuite's version, published in July 2026 and based on more than a million posts, says Instagram engagement peaks in the early morning and early evening, especially early in the week. Its dining, hospitality and tourism category does best from 11am to 3pm on Wednesdays, with lunchtime spikes on Monday and Tuesday too.

Later's guide, updated in April 2026, analysed more than 6 million feed posts from January to October 2024 and found the best time overall was 5am, with anything posted between 3am and 6am getting above-average engagement. Its food and beverage row says 12pm and 5pm, on Tuesday and Friday.

So depending on which study you read, the answer is 5am, midday or mid-afternoon, which is a good reason to treat all three as a rough guide.

#Why don't the published best times agree?

They're measuring different accounts, in different years, and none of them is measuring bookings.

Each study draws on its own customers' accounts, and the periods differ. Later's 2026 guide is built on 2024 posts, while Sprout's windows come from three months over the winter. They're also averages across every kind of business. Even a "food and beverage" category is likely to mix crisp brands and coffee chains in with restaurants, and a national snack brand's followers probably behave quite differently from the people deciding whether to book your Friday tables.

What they count matters too. These studies rank times by engagement (likes, comments, shares and so on). A 5am post might collect plenty of likes from early risers and night-shift workers, but for a venue it'll be sitting there for hours before anyone decides where to have lunch.

Time zones are worth checking whenever you find a chart like this. All three studies say they convert times to the audience's local time, which is helpful. If you come across one quoting US Eastern time, though, it's usually five hours behind the UK, so a "9am" recommendation would mean 2pm here.

Instagram itself doesn't publish a best time. Its ranking explainer lists when a post was shared among the details it uses, alongside how quickly people are liking, commenting, sharing and saving it, and it says Feed considers recent posts from accounts people follow (Instagram). That's about as specific as the platform gets, and it's why posting while your followers are around should give a post a better chance of early interaction.

#When do your customers decide where to go?

This is the bit I'd plan around. It's my own reasoning, since none of the studies measured it: post shortly before the decision, while there's still time to act on it.

• Lunch is usually decided in the late morning, so post between about 10:30am and 11:30am
• After-work drinks get sorted during the mid-afternoon slump, around 3pm to 5pm
• Dinner tonight is often settled late afternoon, while weekend tables get booked earlier in the week
• Weekend plans come together on Thursday and Friday, so post the weekend's events and specials then
• Sunday lunch plans are made on Saturday evening or early Sunday morning, which is when the roast post should go up
• On match days, people pick a pub in the morning and again a couple of hours before kick-off
• Cafe customers often choose on the way in, so that day's bakes do best early, around 7am to 8am

Here's how that looks across a weekend for a pub that does food.

#Suggested posting times by venue type

Use these as a first draft of your schedule, then let your own numbers overrule them.

Most of these sit comfortably with the studies. Sprout's food and beverage windows centre on late morning and lunchtime on weekdays, and Hootsuite's dining category peaks over lunch on Wednesday, so a late-morning post does reasonably well whichever way you look at it.

Weekends come out weakest in Sprout's data, which matters less to a venue than you'd expect. A Saturday morning post about the match or Sunday lunch is aimed at people making plans for that day, so I'd judge it by bookings and how full the room gets. For more on match days, see the guide to matchday posts for sports bars, and cafes will find day-by-day ideas in coffee shop Instagram ideas.

#How do you find your own best time?

Run a small test on your own account, because your followers are the only audience that matters here.

Start with the audience data in Instagram's own insights for your account (Later points people to the professional dashboard for this). Then pick one type of post that you put up every week, such as the specials board or the weekend line-up, and try it at two different times.

Keep everything else as similar as you can: the same kind of photo, a similar caption length, no paid boost on one and not the other. One good week proves nothing (the weather and the football will skew it), which is why four to six weeks is the minimum. The Instagram insights guide explains which numbers to compare, and I'd add one that isn't on Instagram at all: what the till and the bookings diary looked like on those days.

#Does timing matter as much as people think?

Less than what you post. For Feed, Instagram lists its ranking signals roughly in order of importance, starting with what each person has liked, shared, saved and commented on before, then details about the post itself (Instagram), so a dull post at the perfect time still won't get far.

Timing matters most for anything with a deadline. A "few tables left tonight" Story at 9pm is useless; at 4pm it can fill the tables. Later suggests early morning (6am to 8am) and evening (7pm to 9pm) for Stories, though it puts those two windows down to "research and industry patterns" and gives no sample for them. I'd be guided by the deadline first.

You don't need to be on your phone at 11am in the middle of a delivery, either. Instagram lets professional accounts schedule posts, Reels and carousels in advance (TechCrunch), and Venuesmith schedules each post it drafts for a good time of day, with nothing going out until you've approved it. Once timing's sorted, the next question is volume, and there's a separate guide on how often a pub should post on Instagram.