How to schedule a text on iPhone (so it sends at a decent hour)

You wake up at 5:40, remember it’s your niece’s birthday, and want to say so before it slips your mind again. But 5:40 is not a time to make her phone buzz. Here’s how to schedule a text on iPhone so you can write it now and have it land at nine.

The feature is called Send Later, and it arrived with iOS 18 in the fall of 2024. If your iPhone is a few years old it almost certainly has it. If you don’t see it, update your phone first.

How to schedule a text message

1. Open Messages and open the conversation.
2. Tap the + button to the left of the text box.
3. Tap Send Later. If you don’t see it, tap More and it’ll be in that list.
4. A date and time appear above the text box. Tap them to pick when you want it to go out.
5. Type your message and tap the blue send arrow.

The message shows up in the conversation in a dashed outline bubble with the scheduled time above it. Nothing has been sent yet. When the time comes, your phone sends it and the bubble turns solid like any other text.

You can schedule up to 14 days ahead.

How to change or cancel a scheduled text

Before it sends, touch and hold the dashed bubble. You’ll get three useful options:

• Edit Message — fix the wording.
• Edit Time — move it earlier or later, or tap Send Now.
• Delete — cancel it entirely. Nobody is notified.

This is the same long-press menu you use for reactions and for unsending a text, so the gesture should feel familiar.

It only works with blue bubbles

Send Later is an iMessage feature. It works between Apple devices, blue bubbles only.

If the person you’re texting is on Android, or the conversation is green for any other reason, the Send Later option won’t appear at all. That’s the phone telling you it can’t do it, not a settings problem. We explain why some texts are green instead of blue if you want the full story.

Two more things worth knowing:

• Your iPhone does the sending, so it needs to be on and connected at the scheduled time. Off or in a dead zone, and the message goes out when it’s back.
• If you’ve scheduled a text in a group chat, everyone in the group gets it at the same time, same as a normal message.

Five times a scheduled text is the right move

Birthdays and anniversaries. Write it the night before while you’re thinking of it. Schedule it for 9 a.m. It arrives on time and you don’t spend the morning trying to remember.

Anything you’d otherwise send at dawn. Younger people often keep their phones by the bed, and an early buzz wakes them up. If you’re up at 5, they’re not. Schedule it for a civilized hour. This is the single most common complaint we hear about texting adult kids, and Send Later fixes it completely.

A reminder for someone else. “Don’t forget your dentist appointment at 2.” Schedule it for 12:30 the day of, instead of sending it three days early where it’ll be forgotten.

Time zones. Your daughter is in London. You’re in Utah. Write at your 8 p.m., schedule for her 8 a.m.

Something you want to sleep on. You’ve drafted a message that has a little heat in it. Schedule it for tomorrow morning. If you still want to send it, do nothing. If you don’t, delete the dashed bubble and it never happened.

What scheduling doesn’t do

It doesn’t make a bad text good. A lecture at 9 a.m. is still a lecture. Before you schedule anything longer than a few lines, it’s worth asking how it’ll read to a person who’s just picked up their phone.

And it doesn’t tell the other person the message was scheduled. It arrives looking like you typed it right then, which is the point. Nobody needs to know you thought of their birthday at 5:40.

If the draft sitting in that dashed bubble feels sharper than you meant, paste it into the Tone Adjuster and soften it before the clock does the sending for you.