There is no proven best time of day to send LinkedIn prospecting messages. LinkedIn's own published analysis of send times, based on recruiter InMails, concluded that "there is no best time": any time of day gets "fairly the same response rate" because people "respond only when it's convenient for them." In cold email, where there is more data, mornings come out slightly ahead, by less than 0.2 percentage points.
That doesn't make the clock irrelevant. It means the useful question is a different one: when does your prospect read, not when do you hit send. The gap between the two is made of time zones, the prospect's routine, and how long a reply takes to arrive.
This guide pulls together what public sources actually measure about send times, shows how to handle prospects in other time zones, and lays out a simple way to test send times in your own outreach. For the "which day of the week?" question, see the guide on the best day to prospect on LinkedIn, which covers only that.
Is There a Best Time to Send LinkedIn Messages?
There is no public evidence of a winning hour for LinkedIn prospecting messages. LinkedIn measured InMails and found no meaningful difference between times of day. Cold email data shows a slight morning edge, but it measures a different channel and small gaps.
Each source measures something different, so read the table with that in mind:
| Source | What was measured | What it says about time of day |
|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn Talent Blog (2016) | Recruiter InMails in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the pattern checked globally | "There is no best time." Far fewer InMails go out at night and on weekends, but their response rate is "essentially the same" as those sent during business hours |
| LinkedIn Talent Blog (2022) | Tens of millions of InMails from corporate recruiters, May 2021 to April 2022, replies within 30 days | 65% of responses arrive within 24 hours and 90% within one week |
| Belkins (2026) | 7.5M+ cold emails sent in the agency's 2025 campaigns; replies ÷ emails sent | Morning (8 AM–12 PM) 0.54%; early morning (5–8 AM) 0.52%; afternoon (12–5 PM) 0.47%; evening (5–8 PM) 0.43%; late evening (8–11 PM) and night (11 PM–5 AM) 0.40% |
| Microsoft Work Trend Index (2025) | Aggregated Microsoft 365 signals, excluding EU and education tenants | 40% of people online at 6 AM are reviewing email; half of all meetings fall between 9–11 AM and 1–3 PM; by 10 PM, 29% of active workers are back in their inboxes |
Three caveats change how you read it.
No source measures a B2B prospecting DM on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn studies cover recruiter-to-candidate InMails. Belkins covers cold email. Microsoft measures when people use email and meetings, not when they answer salespeople. Treating any of them as "LinkedIn's ideal send time" stretches the data.
Where there is a gap, it is small. In the Belkins data, morning beats afternoon by 0.07 percentage points: roughly seven extra replies per 10,000 emails. Belkins itself opens the study by saying timing "doesn't write your email" and "doesn't fix a weak offer or a bad list."
"Time" may be the sender's, not the prospect's. Belkins notes in its methodology that time-of-day data "reflects the time the email was sent, not the time it was received or read," and that for audiences in multiple time zones the recipient's local time may differ. Some "morning" sends may have landed at dawn or mid-afternoon on the other end.
For a sense of typical acceptance and reply rates in general, see the LinkedIn prospecting benchmarks, with the same caution about what each number measures.
When You Send Is Not When They Read
A message doesn't have to be read the minute it lands. LinkedIn found that 65% of InMail responses arrive within 24 hours and 90% within a week. A message sent at 9 AM may be read at 6 PM and answered the next day, and the send time loses weight along the way.
What we know about reply timing comes from neighboring studies, each useful on one point:
- Most replies come fast, or not at all. In a study of more than 2 million Yahoo Mail users and 16 billion emails (Kooti and co-authors, WWW 2015), half of replies went out within 47 minutes, more than 90% within a day, and the most likely reply time was two minutes. The study covers pairs of people who already emailed each other regularly, not cold outreach. The lesson for prospecting is indirect: people who reply tend to reply soon after they read.
- Messages received at night get slower replies. In the same study, emails received during the night got slower replies than those received during working hours, and morning emails got longer replies. That is the best case for sending during the prospect's business hours: not a proven higher reply rate, but a reply that lands closer to when they read.
- The workday starts early and ends late. According to Microsoft, by 6 AM many users are already triaging their inboxes, and half of all meetings fill the 9–11 AM and 1–3 PM windows. By 10 PM, nearly a third of active workers return to their inboxes. If your prospect spends the morning in meetings, your 9 AM message gets read between meetings, not at 9.
That points to a reasonable hypothesis, untested in LinkedIn prospecting: what matters is your message sitting near the top of the inbox when the prospect opens LinkedIn with time to answer. That moment varies by person. Founders who check their phone at 7 AM, directors who only open LinkedIn between meetings, sales teams who live in the app: each audience has its own routine, and no market average replaces yours. A clear follow-up structure gives you more than one shot at catching it.
Morning, Afternoon, or Evening: What You Can Conclude
With the evidence available, the honest recommendation is short: send during the prospect's business hours, default to mornings if you have to pick, and treat any narrower window as a hypothesis to test.
- The prospect's business hours, not yours. This is the one rule that needs no study: a work message that lands at 2 AM competes with everything that piles up by morning and is more likely to be glanced at on a phone, out of context.
- Mornings as a starting point. That's where cold email data shows a small edge, and it fits the routine Microsoft describes. But the edge is too small to justify stacking every send between 8 and 10 AM.
- Spread sends across the workday. Concentrating volume in a single hour makes your activity look less like a person's and creates spikes in the decision-maker's inbox. The guide on safe LinkedIn message automation covers the behaviors that lead to restrictions.
- Follow up in a different part of the day. If the first message went out in the morning with no reply, sending the follow-up in the afternoon is a cheap way to cover a different reading routine. No study proves the gain; it's diversification, not a rule. The post on the LinkedIn B2B prospecting cadence covers spacing between touches, and which cadence touchpoint gets the most replies covers the sequence itself.
Copy matters more than the clock. In its 2016 analysis, LinkedIn wrote that "what really drives response rates is length and personalization." The guide on how to increase your LinkedIn reply rate covers that side, and the connection message examples help with the first touch.
The Prospect's Time Zone: The One Adjustment That Needs No Test
If you prospect outside your own region, "business hours" has to mean the prospect's. Sending everything at 9 AM Eastern guarantees that part of your list gets the message before or after their workday.
Time zones shift during the year, which trips up even ready-made tables. The US moves clocks on the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in November; the UK and the EU move on the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October. Brazil has had no daylight saving time since 2019 (Decree 9,772), though the government reviews the question each year. Mexico abolished daylight saving time in most of the country in October 2022: according to its national metrology center, CENAM, only the northern border strip still changes clocks.
| Destination | Difference from New York (ET) | When to send (ET) to land at 9 AM there |
|---|---|---|
| London and Lisbon | +5h most of the year; +4h in the March and Oct–Nov mismatch weeks | 4 AM (5 AM in mismatch weeks) |
| Berlin, Paris, Madrid | +6h most of the year; +5h in the mismatch weeks | 3 AM (4 AM in mismatch weeks) |
| São Paulo | +1h during US daylight time; +2h the rest of the year | 8 AM or 7 AM |
| Mexico City | −2h during US daylight time; −1h the rest of the year (northern border strip differs) | 11 AM or 10 AM |
| Bogotá and Lima | −1h during US daylight time; same time the rest of the year | 10 AM or 9 AM |
| Chicago / Los Angeles | −1h / −3h all year | 10 AM / 12 PM |
In practice:
- Split your list by region before building the campaign. Location shows on the LinkedIn profile, and if you filter by region in Sales Navigator, the split comes ready; the Chattie vs. Sales Navigator comparison explains where each tool fits.
- Schedule each group in its own local time. For Europe from the US East Coast, that means sends scheduled for the early hours of your morning, or accepting that the message lands late morning or after lunch over there.
- Watch the transition weeks. Between the second and last Sundays of March, and between the last Sunday of October and the first Sunday of November, the US–Europe gap is one hour shorter. Fixed tables get those weeks wrong.
- Global companies: use the time zone where the person sits, not headquarters.
How to Measure the Best Send Time in Your Own Outreach
If time of day matters for your audience, only your own history will show it. The test is easy to set up, but small differences need large samples.
1. Define the metric. Use reply rate (conversations with a reply ÷ messages sent) and count each reply by send time in the prospect's time zone, not yours. Use a fixed window to count a reply, for example 7 days, since LinkedIn found 90% of InMail responses arrive within a week. Also log how long each reply took: that shows you when your audience reads.
2. Compare two blocks, not eight hours. For example, morning (8 AM–12 PM) versus afternoon (1–6 PM), always in the prospect's local time. With two groups, each builds sample faster.
3. Change only the time. Same message, same ideal customer profile, same account, same weekdays. If you change the copy too, you can't tell which change made the difference.
4. Randomize who goes into each block. Shuffle the list and assign leads at random. If your best leads all go out in the morning, the test measures the list, not the clock.
5. Respect sample size. Using the standard two-proportion calculation (95% confidence, 80% power), in a hypothetical example where your reply rate sits around 10%:
- detecting that one block replies at 20% (double) takes about 200 sends per block;
- detecting a difference from 10% to 13% takes about 1,800 sends per block.
These numbers are arithmetic, not market data: plug in your own baseline and rerun the math in a sample-size calculator. If time-of-day differences in your audience are the size measured in cold email, no single account will ever see them. A small difference over a few hundred sends is noise.
6. Run full weeks and decide on what shows up, including "nothing." If the blocks come out similar, that's a useful answer: you can spread sends across the workday and put the effort into the list and the message.
What About the Day of the Week?
Day of the week is a separate question with separate sources. In short: in the LinkedIn Talent Blog's 2022 analysis of recruiter InMails, Monday was the best day for InMail "but just barely," Saturday came in 8% below average and Friday 4% below. The details, the cold email sources, and a day-of-week test are in the guide on LinkedIn reply rate by day of week.
Where Chattie Fits
Chattie doesn't publish platform usage data, so this guide contains no "Chattie best send time." What we can describe is how the product handles the clock, because that's configuration, not statistics:
- Sends only during business hours. It's a fixed ceiling users can't turn off.
- Fixed daily limits: 25 invitations, 40 conversations, and 200 LinkedIn actions per day. These ceilings are fixed by default — above 25 invitations per day, only with the user's own risk consent — and they're what keeps account-restriction risk low, never zero.
- Pending invitations withdrawn automatically after 15 days.
- Three modes: in Autopilot the AI sends the message; in Semi-pilot the AI sends until the lead replies and then a human approves each response; in Copilot the AI writes and a person approves before it goes out.
The limits help you plan a send-time test. With up to 40 conversations a day split between morning and afternoon, each block builds about 100 sends per workweek: reaching 200 per block takes about two weeks, and 1,800 would take months on a single account. Because sending stays within business hours, the test compares blocks of the workday, not 2 AM against 9 AM. If your list mixes regions with very different time zones, split campaigns by region as described above; this guide doesn't assume any automatic time zone adjustment.
FAQ
What is the best time to send LinkedIn messages?
There is no proven best time. LinkedIn analyzed InMails and concluded that any time of day gets fairly the same response rate, because people reply when it's convenient. In cold email, mornings come out slightly ahead, by less than 0.2 percentage points. The safe default is to send during the prospect's business hours and test whether your audience has a preferred window.
Does sending LinkedIn messages at night hurt reply rates?
There's no data showing a large drop on LinkedIn. LinkedIn's 2016 analysis found essentially the same response rate for InMails sent outside business hours. In email, messages received at night get slower replies. When in doubt, schedule for the prospect's business hours.
How do I handle a prospect's time zone in another country?
Check the location on their LinkedIn profile, split your list by region, and schedule each group in its local time. Remember that the US and Europe switch to daylight time on different dates, that Brazil has had no daylight saving time since 2019, and that Mexico dropped it in 2022 except along the northern border.
How quickly do prospects usually reply?
In LinkedIn's study of recruiter InMails, 65% of responses arrived within 24 hours and 90% within one week. In email between people who already know each other, half of replies go out in under an hour. A 7-day window is enough to measure replies in a send-time test.
How many sends do I need to know if one time beats another?
It depends on your baseline and the size of the difference. For example, using the standard calculation for two proportions with a reply rate near 10%, detecting a jump to 20% takes about 200 sends per block; detecting 10% versus 13% takes about 1,800 per block. That's why comparing two blocks, such as morning and afternoon, works better than ranking every hour.
Does Chattie pick the best time to send?
Chattie sends only during business hours and respects fixed daily ceilings of 25 invitations, 40 conversations, and 200 actions. It doesn't promise an "optimal time" based on platform data, because Chattie doesn't publish usage data. The test in this guide is how you find out whether your audience has a pattern.
Conclusion
The honest answer to "what's the best time to send LinkedIn messages?" is that there's no magic hour. LinkedIn found no meaningful difference between times of day for InMail, and cold email data shows a morning edge of less than 0.2 percentage points. Prospects reply when they read, and they read when their routine allows.
What to do with that: send during the prospect's business hours, get the time zone right when you prospect across regions, default to mornings if you have to choose, spread volume across the workday, and put the time you'd spend on scheduling into the list and the message. If you want to know whether timing matters for your niche, compare morning and afternoon for a few weeks and decide on your own numbers.
If you want prospecting that runs within business hours and under daily limits that don't go up, take a look at Chattie, the AI SDR for LinkedIn.
References
External sources cited in this article.
- LinkedIn Talent Blog — Divy Menghani, "Data Reveals the Best Time to Send InMails (and the Answer Will Surprise You)," September 12, 2016 (https://www.linkedin.com/business/talent/blog/product-tips/best-time-to-send-inmails)
- LinkedIn Talent Blog — Greg Lewis, "How to Improve Your InMail Response Rate, According to LinkedIn Data," 2022: time to response and methodology (https://www.linkedin.com/business/talent/blog/talent-strategy/these-inmails-get-best-response-rates)
- Belkins — "What is the best time to send B2B emails?", study of 2025 cold emails, updated June 2026 (https://belkins.io/blog/best-time-to-send-email)
- Microsoft WorkLab — "Breaking down the infinite workday," Work Trend Index, June 17, 2025 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/breaking-down-infinite-workday)
- Kooti, Aiello, Grbovic, Lerman, and Mantrach — "Evolution of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload," WWW 2015 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00704)
- Presidency of Brazil — Decree No. 9,772 of April 25, 2019, ending daylight saving time (https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_ato2019-2022/2019/decreto/D9772.htm)
- CENAM (Mexico) — Official time of Mexico: time zones and the northern border's seasonal time (https://www.cenam.mx/hora_oficial/default2.aspx)