How to Schedule LinkedIn Posts in 2026: Native, Tools, API

On desktop, the steps from LinkedIn's help article on scheduling posts are:

1. Click Start a post at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
2. Write the post in the What do you want to talk about? field and add any media.
3. Click the clock icon in the lower right of the composer.
4. Pick the date and time. The dropdown moves in 30-minute steps, but you can type an exact time instead.
5. Click Next, check the date shown above the post, then click Schedule.

In the mobile app it is the same flow: tap Post in the navigation bar, write the post, tap the clock icon in the upper right, choose the time, then tap Next and Schedule.

The window is 10 minutes to 3 months from now. LinkedIn converts the time you pick to UTC using your device's time zone, which matters if you schedule from a laptop still set to another city: the post goes out at that city's 9 a.m., not yours. Events and job posts can't be scheduled from a profile.

Page scheduling lives in the admin view, and only super admins and content admins can use it. Go to your Page's admin view, open Page posts in the left menu, click Start a post, then use the clock icon the same way. The full steps are in LinkedIn's guide to scheduling a Page post.

Page scheduling has tighter rules than profile scheduling:

• The earliest slot is one hour from now, not 10 minutes. The latest is still three months out.
• You can't schedule events, posts with multiple photos, reshares, polls, jobs or service posts.
• A scheduled Page post can't be promoted through Browse existing content in Campaign Manager until it is published.
• Every admin sees the Page's scheduled posts and can edit, reschedule or delete them. If an admin is removed, their scheduled posts move to the admin who removed them.

The three routes solve different problems. The table puts LinkedIn's documented limits next to what you get from a tool or from your own code.

If you manage clients, the native scheduler stops scaling fast: every client means another login, and nothing gives you one calendar across them. That is the job of the tools in our guide to social media management software for agencies, which also covers client approval and white-label options.

Tools such as Buffer and Hootsuite don't use LinkedIn's native scheduler. You connect your LinkedIn account through OAuth, the tool keeps your post on its own servers, and at the scheduled time it calls LinkedIn's API to publish. That design explains most of what you see in practice:

• Scheduled posts don't show in LinkedIn's queue. They live in the tool until they publish, so the clock icon in LinkedIn won't list them.
• Reconnecting is normal. LinkedIn issues every access token with a 60-day lifespan, according to LinkedIn's OAuth documentation. A tool without refresh-token access has to ask you to reconnect, and a post scheduled after that date fails if nobody does.
• Page posting needs separate permission. Posting as a person uses the w_member_social permission, while posting as a company Page uses w_organization_social and requires an admin or content admin role on that Page. Check that a tool supports Pages before you buy it for one.

If you want to self-host instead of paying per seat, our list of open source social media schedulers compares the options you can run yourself.

Not directly. In the LinkedIn Posts API reference, lifecycleState accepts only PUBLISHED when you create a post, and there is no field for a future publish time. The call publishes the post the moment it succeeds.

curl -X POST 'https://api.linkedin.com/rest/posts' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN' \
  -H 'X-Restli-Protocol-Version: 2.0.0' \
  -H 'Linkedin-Version: YYYYMM' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "author": "urn:li:person:MEMBER_ID",
    "commentary": "Our Q4 hiring post",
    "visibility": "PUBLIC",
    "distribution": {
      "feedDistribution": "MAIN_FEED",
      "targetEntities": [],
      "thirdPartyDistributionChannels": []
    },
    "lifecycleState": "PUBLISHED",
    "isReshareDisabledByAuthor": false
  }'
# lifecycleState accepts only PUBLISHED on create.
# There is no publish-at field: the post goes live when this call succeeds.

So scheduling through the API means building the scheduler yourself: store the post with its target time, run a worker that picks it up when the time arrives, make the call, and handle the failures in between, such as an expired token, a rate limit or a video still processing. Our walkthrough of how social media schedulers work covers that queue, the publish call and delivery tracking piece by piece.

If you would rather not run that queue, PostGate does it for you: send the post with a scheduled_at time and it publishes to LinkedIn at that instant, then reports whether the post went live. The LinkedIn scheduling API guide shows the request, and recurring schedules fill a weekly queue from slots such as 09:00, 13:30. PostGate posts to personal LinkedIn profiles; company Page publishing needs LinkedIn partner access it doesn't have today.

For posts scheduled from your profile:

1. Click Start a post. A badge on the clock icon shows how many posts are waiting.
2. Click the clock icon, then View all scheduled posts.
3. Open the More menu on a post and choose Modify schedule or Edit post, or click the delete icon to remove it.

On a Page, scheduled posts show in the admin view, where any admin can post them now, edit them, change the time or delete them. Posts scheduled in a third-party tool are changed in that tool, not in LinkedIn.

• The device or tool time zone matches the audience you are posting for.
• No post in the batch is an event, job, poll or multi-photo Page post, which the native scheduler refuses.
• Page posts are at least one hour out; profile posts at least 10 minutes out.
• Nothing is more than three months ahead.
• If a tool publishes for you, its LinkedIn connection won't hit the 60-day token expiry before the last post in the batch.
• Someone checks the first post after it goes live, before the rest of the week follows it.