Can you schedule YouTube Shorts?

The steps, from YouTube Help

A Short is scheduled the way any YouTube upload is. From YouTube Help, read on 10 October 2026:

1. Sign in to YouTube Studio.
2. Select Create, then Upload videos.
3. Select the file and enter the video’s details. For a Short the file is square or vertical and up to three minutes (how to upload Shorts).
4. Click the Schedule card.
5. Set the date, time and time zone you want the video published, and select Schedule.

YouTube describes scheduled publishing as taking a private video public at a set time. Its page names the YouTube app as well as YouTube Studio, but its page on uploading Shorts from a phone lists a title and the privacy settings and shows no schedule step. We could not confirm where the phone’s Shorts flow offers scheduling, so the steps above are the ones YouTube documents in full: YouTube Studio on a computer.

Changing the time, or publishing early

In YouTube Studio, open Content in the left menu, select the video and click Edit. To move the time, leave the visibility on Private, click EDIT DRAFT and choose the new time under Schedule. To publish at once, set the visibility to Public and select Publish.

What people miss

• The watch-page date is Pacific time. When a video goes public, the date under it is based on Pacific Standard Time. A video scheduled in a time zone ahead of that can show a different date there than in YouTube Studio.
• A strike stops it. With a Community Guidelines strike on the account, a scheduled video doesn’t publish during the penalty period. It is set to private and has to be scheduled again when the period ends.
• Up to 15 Shorts can be chosen at a time. Each stays a draft until you click EDIT DRAFT and complete its details, so a batch is uploaded once and scheduled one by one.
• Uploads have a daily limit. YouTube limits how many videos a channel can upload in 24 hours across desktop, mobile and its API, and says the limit varies with the country or region and the channel’s history (YouTube Help). It names no number. Because you schedule on the upload page, the video is uploaded on the day you schedule it, and that is the day the limit counts it.

Through YouTube’s API

A scheduling tool can use the field YouTube’s API gives for this. In the Videos resource, status.publishAt is the date and time a video is scheduled to publish, in ISO 8601 format. It can be set only while the video’s privacy status is private, and a time in the past publishes the video right away. So with the API YouTube itself holds the video and makes it public, unlike a network where the tool keeps the post and sends it at the time. The same daily upload limit applies to the API.

Scheduling Shorts with Mellow Hub

Hub uploads one video to YouTube, vertical, square or landscape, with a required title of up to 100 characters. YouTube decides whether it is a Short: Hub has no Shorts switch, because YouTube’s API has none. In Compose you choose the networks and a time, and the same video can go to Instagram Reels and TikTok in the same post, each with its own caption.

A post scheduled in Hub is uploaded to YouTube at its set time, so the daily upload limit meets it on the day it is due. When YouTube refuses an upload for a daily limit, Hub doesn’t mark the post failed: it keeps the post waiting and tries again after the next reset, which Google’s API documentation places at midnight Pacific Time, up to 3 times before it reports a failure.

Hub is paid: plans start at $19 a month (Solo), after a 7-day trial with a card on file that costs nothing if you cancel before it ends, and a monthly plan's first month is 20% off. Publishing is unlimited on every plan, under a fair-use ceiling that stops automated floods (900 publications a month on Solo). One publication is one post on one account, so a post sent to five networks counts as five. There are no automatic overage charges.