Best Day to Send an Invoice: Data Reveals All [2026]

Tuesday is the best day to send an invoice, at least by the numbers: emails sent on a Tuesday get opened at a 31.27% rate, the highest of any day of the week, according to Omnisend’s 2026 analysis of roughly 26 billion sends. The margin over the worst day is real but small, and it matters less than what the invoice actually says once it’s opened.

What day of the week gets the highest open rate?

Omnisend’s 2026 report, drawn from close to 26 billion tracked email sends, ranks every day of the week by open rate. Tuesday leads at 31.27%, followed by Thursday at 30.42%, Sunday at 30.60%, Wednesday at 30.27%, and Friday at 30.18%. Monday and Saturday trail at 29.67% and 29.99%. The order isn’t a fluke of one dataset: HubSpot’s earlier study, built on 20 million emails over a 10-month period, separately ranked Tuesday first, with Monday and Wednesday close behind.

Figure 1: Email open rate by day of week. Source: Omnisend, 2026 (approximately 26 billion emails analyzed).

Neither study measured invoices specifically. Both are general business and marketing email datasets, and an invoice is a narrower category: a single, expected message tied to a specific piece of work rather than a broadcast campaign. That distinction matters for how much weight to put on the exact percentages, but not for the day-of-week ranking itself, since the underlying reason Tuesday performs well (a settled inbox, past the Monday backlog, before the week’s meetings pile up) applies to any business email, invoices included.

How big is the difference between the best and worst day, really?

Smaller than the “best day” framing implies. The full spread between Tuesday’s 31.27% peak and Monday’s 29.67% low is 1.6 percentage points, and every other day of the week sits within a single point of the middle of that range. Click-to-sent rate tells a similar story: Tuesday leads there too, at 0.81%, against a Saturday low of 0.68%, a gap of 0.13 points. GetResponse’s 2024 Email Marketing Benchmarks Report, built on more than 4.4 billion emails sent in 2023, adds a third data point pointing the same direction: it found Tuesday and Thursday produced the best click-through rates of the week, while noting that overall engagement stays fairly stable across the entire workweek. That’s a real, repeatable pattern worth acting on if it costs nothing to schedule a send, but it isn’t the difference between an invoice getting paid and not getting paid. Treat day-of-week as a tie-breaker, not a strategy.

Figure 2: Tuesday’s click-to-sent rate leads every other day of the week. Source: Omnisend, 2026.

What time of day should an invoice go out?

Once Tuesday is picked as the day, the hour still matters. Omnisend’s 2026 data shows a 33.41% open rate for Tuesday sends at 7 a.m., Tuesday’s own best hour, ahead of Wednesday’s 9 a.m. slot at 32.12%. It isn’t the single best hour-and-day slot in the whole dataset, though: Sunday’s 11 a.m. peak edges it out at 33.69%, even though Sunday’s overall daily average trails Tuesday’s. HubSpot’s study, working from a different email set entirely, separately found 11 a.m. EST carried the strongest response rate for business email generally, and GetResponse’s 2024 report points to the 4-6 a.m. and 5-7 p.m. windows as the strongest for engagement across its 4.4-billion-email dataset. None of the studies agree on one exact hour, which is itself useful information: the effect of hour-of-day is real but sits inside a broad early-morning-to-late-morning window rather than one precise minute, so a send scheduled anywhere from early morning through late morning captures most of the advantage without needing to chase a single “perfect” timestamp. Automated scheduling makes this easy to apply consistently rather than something to remember by hand every week, which matters because a rule only helps if it actually gets followed on the weeks a business is busiest.

Figure 3: Tuesday sends get opened at the week’s highest rate. Source: Omnisend, 2026.

For a business sending invoices on a predictable schedule, this translates into a simple habit rather than a complicated rule: batch invoices to go out Tuesday morning where the job allows it, and don’t lose sleep over the exact minute. The bigger question, covered next, is what happens after the invoice is actually opened, since that’s where the real payment-speed gap between different invoices shows up, and it has almost nothing to do with the day or hour a send went out.

Does invoice timing actually change how fast you get paid?

Timing changes whether an invoice gets opened. What changes whether it gets paid is closer to its wording and terms. FreshBooks’ analysis of more than 1 million small-business invoices found invoices carrying 7-day payment terms get paid within that 7-day window 58.05% of the time, compared to 52.84% for 14-day terms and just 40.22% for invoices with 30-day terms, a 17.83-point gap between the two ends. That’s more than ten times the 1.6-point spread between the best and worst day of the week to send, and it comes from a lever that costs nothing to pull: the wording printed on the invoice itself, not when it left the outbox.

Figure 4: Share of invoices paid within 7 days, by payment terms. Source: FreshBooks, analysis of 1M+ small-business invoices.

Wording carries a similar effect on whether an invoice gets paid at all, not just paid quickly. FreshBooks’ same dataset found invoices that include the phrase “Thank You” in their terms get ultimately paid 89.61% of the time, and invoices carrying an “Interest” clause hit 92.15%, both comfortably ahead of the 78.62% average across every invoice in the dataset. Even “Please” wording, the softer of the two politeness terms tested, still lands at 88.07%, well above the baseline, and invoices with 14-day terms come in close behind the interest-clause figure at 91.51%. None of that has anything to do with which day the invoice went out; it’s entirely a function of what the invoice says once someone opens it, which is exactly why timing alone is the wrong place to put all of the effort, even though it’s the easiest lever to schedule and forget. Put the two data sets side by side and the pattern holds in both directions: shorter, more specific terms get paid faster within their own window, and the exact same shorter, more specific terms are also the ones most likely to get paid at all before an invoice goes stale.

Figure 5: Share of invoices ultimately paid, ranked by wording. Source: FreshBooks, analysis of 1M+ small-business invoices.

How does timing fit with the rest of getting paid on time?

Timing is one small lever in a much bigger problem. 55% of all US B2B invoiced sales were overdue in 2025, per Atradius’s Payment Practices Barometer, and much of that gap comes down to whether an invoice was ever chased after it went unopened, not just when it was first sent. A well-timed Tuesday-morning send that never gets a follow-up still drifts into the same overdue pile as one sent on a Friday afternoon. For the full picture on how widespread the overdue problem is, see our late payment statistics for 2026. What actually recovers an unopened invoice is a reminder cadence that fires on a schedule instead of whenever someone remembers, which matters more for total collections than the day the original invoice went out, and it connects to the broader, still-open question of when invoices get read at all relative to when they’re sent, not just which weekday performs best.

Factor	Best-performing option	Effect size	Source
Day of week sent	Tuesday	31.27% open rate (vs. 29.67% low)	Omnisend, 2026
Hour of day sent (on Tuesday)	7 a.m.	33.41% open rate, Tuesday’s own peak	Omnisend, 2026
Payment terms wording	7-day terms	58.05% paid within term (vs. 40.22%)	FreshBooks
Politeness wording	”Thank You” / Interest clause	89.61% / 92.15% ultimately paid	FreshBooks

The Bottom Line

Send invoices on a Tuesday morning if it costs you nothing to schedule it that way; the data backs it up, if only by a point and a half. But don’t stop there. Wording and terms move payment speed by a much wider margin than the day of the week does, and neither one replaces a system that actually chases an invoice once it’s out the door. BillyPaid’s payment reminder tool automates that follow-up on a fixed schedule, so an invoice that goes unopened on a Tuesday still gets a nudge before it drifts into the 55% of B2B invoices that end up overdue.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best day of the week to send an invoice?

Tuesday. Omnisend’s 2026 analysis of roughly 26 billion emails found Tuesday sends get opened at a 31.27% rate, the highest of any day, edging out Thursday (30.42%) and Sunday (30.60%). HubSpot’s earlier 20-million-email study reached the same ranking, with Tuesday first and Monday and Wednesday close behind.

What time of day should I send an invoice?

Morning, on the day you already picked. Omnisend’s 2026 data shows a 33.41% open rate for Tuesday sends at 7 a.m., Tuesday’s own best hour, while HubSpot’s study separately found 11 a.m. EST carried the strongest response for business email in general.

Does the day I send an invoice actually change how fast I get paid?

Only at the margins, and less than the wording does. The gap between the best day (Tuesday, 31.27% opens) and the worst (Monday, 29.67%) is about 1.6 percentage points. FreshBooks’ study of over 1 million invoices found a much bigger lever: invoices with 7-day terms get paid within 7 days 58.05% of the time, versus 40.22% for 30-day terms, a 17.83-point gap from wording alone.

Does it matter if I send an invoice on a weekend?

Less than intuition suggests. Sunday actually posted a 30.60% open rate in Omnisend’s 2026 data, ahead of Monday, Friday, and Saturday. An invoice sitting unopened over a weekend isn’t losing engagement so much as delaying the moment someone can act on it, since most small-business payment runs still happen on weekdays.

Sources and References

1. Omnisend: The Best Time to Send an Email (2026 Research)
2. HubSpot: The Best Times to Get Your Business Email Opened, Based on Data From 20 Million Emails (2015)
3. FreshBooks: Use Your Invoice Payment Terms to Get Paid Faster
4. Atradius: Payment Practices Barometer (2025)
5. GetResponse: Email Marketing Benchmarks Report (2024, data from 4.4 billion emails sent in 2023)

Note: All figures verified as of September 2026.