The Best Time to Pitch Podcasts: A Data-Backed Answer

Timing matters less than pitch quality. Let us be direct about that upfront. A mediocre pitch sent at the optimal time will underperform a great pitch sent at a bad time. If you are still working on your pitch quality, that is where your attention should go, not timing optimization.

That said, when you are ready to optimize, timing does produce measurable differences in response rates. Based on industry benchmarks for podcast outreach, here is what we know.

Best days to send

Tuesday and Wednesday tend to produce the highest response rates. Monday suffers from post-weekend inbox backlog. Thursday and Friday see declining attention as hosts shift focus toward the weekend or end-of-week tasks. Sunday outperforms Saturday for async audiences who process email over the weekend.

The differences are real but not enormous: industry benchmarks suggest Tuesday pitches generate noticeably more responses than Thursday pitches from the same sender with equivalent pitch quality. Meaningful, but not the lever most people are looking for.

Best times to send

7am to 9am local time (the host's timezone) consistently outperforms all other windows. These pitches are at the top of the inbox when hosts start their day and have not yet been buried by subsequent messages.

2pm to 4pm is a secondary peak, catching hosts during a post-lunch inbox check before afternoon meetings.

Avoid 5pm to 9pm. These pitches arrive in an end-of-day or personal-time window where most hosts do not process work email.

Seasonal patterns

September and January are the strongest months for podcast pitch response rates. Both are seasonal new-start periods when podcast hosts are planning programming, often looking to book fresh guests for new seasons or content calendars.

July and August show the weakest response rates, consistent with summer schedule disruptions and vacation patterns across most of our podcast host database. November and December see declining response rates as attention shifts to end-of-year events and holiday scheduling.

What to do with this data

If you are sending 10 pitches, do not overthink timing. Send when you have a good pitch ready. If you are running a systematic campaign of 50 or more pitches per month, scheduling Tuesday and Wednesday morning sends during September through June will measurably lift your aggregate response rate.

PitchCentric's campaign scheduler lets you set preferred send windows so your pitches go out at the right time automatically, even if you write them at midnight.