The best time to send Instagram DMs (from 10,677 messages)

The short answer: send during the working day, between 9am and 6pm, and avoid the middle of the night. Midday to mid-afternoon did best. The day of the week matters less than most people think. This comes from 10,677 cold DMs sent through Nousify.ai campaigns, looked at by the hour and day they went out.

The best hours

We grouped messages by the time they were sent, in the sender's own time zone, and counted how many got a reply.

Anything from 9am to 9pm is close: between 9.2% and 10.6%. The real difference is at the edges. Messages sent late at night got about half the replies of messages sent after lunch.

The likely reason is simple. A message that arrives while someone is awake and on their phone gets seen at the top of their requests. One that arrives at 3am is buried under everything else by morning.

The best days

There is no clean pattern here. Sunday was the best day and Saturday the worst, with the weekdays mixed in between. The gap from best to worst is about 3.5 points, and some of that is noise: different accounts send on different days. Do not rebuild your week around this. Sending every day beats waiting for the right one.

A caveat about time zones

These times are the sender's, not the recipient's. We do not know where each lead lives. If you sell to people in your own country, the sender's time is a good stand-in. If you are in London messaging people in California, shift your sending window so it lands in their afternoon, not yours.

How quickly people reply

Timing also matters for what you do after sending. Replies come fast or not at all for most people, with a long tail.

• More than one reply in five arrives within ten minutes. Those people are on their phone right now, and a fast answer from you keeps the conversation alive.
• Half arrive within about five hours.
• One in four takes longer than a day, so a quiet first evening means little.
• After a week, almost everyone who was going to reply has. That is the point to send a follow-up or move on.

What to do with this

1. Set your campaign to send between 9am and 6pm in your customers' time zone.
2. Send every day you can. Do not skip days waiting for a better one.
3. Check your inbox a few times during the sending window, since a fifth of replies come within minutes.
4. Wait three days before judging a batch, and a week before following up.

In Nousify.ai you choose the days and hours a campaign is allowed to send, and it spaces the messages out inside that window. Replies arrive in the Inbox on their own, marked Needs Reply, so the fast ones are easy to catch.

How we measured this

The figures cover first messages sent through Nousify.ai campaigns up to October 2026, from 23 accounts that each sent at least 50 cold DMs and had replies recorded. Send times are in the time zone set on each campaign. Accounts differ in niche and audience and do not all send at the same hours, so these are patterns, not controlled tests.