The Best Time to Knock on Doors: What 80,871 Door Knocks Show

We analyzed 81,191 logged door interactions from 82 political campaigns to find out when voters actually answer the door. The short version: most campaigns are knocking at the wrong time, and the gap is bigger than we expected.

Timing advice in this industry is mostly folklore. People repeat what they were told on their first campaign, and nobody checks. So we checked.

The headline finding: campaigns knock in the afternoon, but voters are home in the evening

Between 1:00 and 4:00 PM, campaigns in our data logged 40,762 door interactions. Between 5:00 and 8:00 PM, they logged 18,419 — less than half as many.

But the afternoon window is where canvassers most often find nobody home.

Campaigns put 2.2 times more effort into the window where voters are nearly twice as likely to be out. That is a lot of walking for nothing.

What is the best time of day to knock on doors?

Between 5:00 and 8:00 PM. Here is the full curve, with each hour shown in the canvasser's own local time.

The busiest hour for canvassers is 3:00 PM, which carries 13.2% of all knocking and a 32.6% miss rate. The best-performing hour is 5:00 PM, at 15.2%, which gets 10.4% of the effort.

Mid-morning and mid-afternoon are the worst stretches. At 10:00 AM and again at 2:00 PM, roughly one door in three is empty — people are at work, on school runs, or out doing errands.

What is the best day of the week to canvass?

Saturday, and campaigns already know it. Saturday carries more knocking than any other day and produces the fewest empty doors.

Friday is the worst day to canvass by a clear margin, with more than one door in three empty. Monday is second worst. If you have limited volunteer hours, those are the two days to give up first.

The old advice to focus on Tuesday through Thursday holds up only partly. Tuesday and Wednesday are genuinely strong. Thursday is unremarkable — middling on availability and the least-used weekday in the data.

Why is the gap so large?

Nothing mysterious. Afternoon shifts are easier to staff. Volunteers are available after lunch, daylight is reliable, and it feels productive to start early. Evening canvassing means eating dinner late, walking in the dark half the year, and asking volunteers for the part of the day they most want to keep.

So campaigns optimize for the schedule that is easiest to fill, then wonder why contact rates disappoint. The convenient hours and the effective hours are not the same hours, and the data says the difference is close to a factor of two.

How we did this

Being specific about method matters, so here it is.

Two different samples do two different jobs here, and it matters which is which.

• When campaigns knock (every “share of knocking” figure) comes from 81,191 logged door interactions — visits and status updates, excluding anything later reverted — across 82 campaigns and 166 canvassers, between 16 August 2025 and 22 September 2026. Counting a knock needs no outcome, so the full dataset applies.
• Whether anyone answered (every “nobody home” figure) comes from a deliberately narrower slice: the 10 campaigns that actually record empty doors, covering 55 canvassers and 29,572 knocks.
• Why the restriction. Most campaigns log a status only when something notable happened — a voter moved, refused, pledged support. An empty door is unremarkable, so it often goes unrecorded. Pooling those campaigns with the ones that log every knock does not average two estimates; it mixes a measurement with an absence of one, and pushes the apparent miss rate toward zero. Our first pass at this analysis made exactly that mistake and reported rates roughly half of what the measuring campaigns show.
• Time handling: every timestamp is converted from UTC into the canvasser's own recorded timezone, so a 6:00 PM knock in California and a 6:00 PM knock in Georgia count as the same hour.
• Robustness: the evening advantage appears independently in campaigns run by different operators, at different absolute levels. The direction is consistent; the levels are not, which is why we would trust the ranking of hours more than any single percentage.

What to do with this

Three changes, in order of how much they are worth:

1. Move your weekday effort later. If your standard weekday shift starts at 2:00 PM, starting at 4:30 PM instead moves you from a 31.2% miss rate to an 18.0% one. Nothing else on this list is as cheap.
2. Stop canvassing Friday. More than a third of doors are empty. Move those hours to Saturday, which is already your best day.
3. Protect the 5:00 to 7:00 PM block. It is the highest-yield stretch of the week and currently gets under a fifth of total effort. Treat it as the shift you fill first, not the one you fill if volunteers are willing.

Your district will differ — measure it

These are averages across 82 campaigns. A retirement community and a neighborhood full of shift workers do not run on the same clock, and the only way to learn yours is to log what time you knocked and what happened.

That is the actual argument for tracking your canvassing: not that data is virtuous, but that the conventional wisdom about timing turns out to be half wrong, and you cannot tell which half applies to your streets without your own numbers.

Knock later. Skip Friday. Measure the rest.

Analysis by CampaignKnock, based on 81,191 logged door interactions from 82 campaigns between August 2025 and September 2026; availability rates from the 10 campaigns that record empty doors. Figures may be cited with attribution.