The Friday effect: more releases go out that day than any other, and refusal rates go with them
"Bad news on a Friday" is a well-worn piece of media-relations folklore - release something when the news cycle is winding down for the weekend. We can actually check whether FOI disclosure follows the same rhythm, using the one clean structured date every release in this dataset carries: when it was actually published.
Friday is genuinely different
20.2% of every release we track went out on a Friday - well above the one-in-seven (14.3%) you'd expect if publishing were spread evenly across the week. No other single weekday comes close to that share. And Friday releases carry refusal or exemption language at 22.7%, against 19.2% for the rest of the week combined - a real gap, and it's built on a large sample (4,611 Friday releases), not a handful of outliers.
| Day | Share of all releases | Refusal / exemption rate |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 16.7% | 20.3% |
| Tuesday | 19.2% | 19.2% |
| Wednesday | 20.1% | 16.5% |
| Thursday | 20.3% | 21.3% |
| Friday | 20.2% | 22.7% |
| Saturday | 0.6% | 33.9% |
| Sunday | 2.9% | 13.2% |
Weekend numbers look dramatic but shouldn't be trusted at face value - Saturday's sample is just 127 releases, easily swung by a handful of automated batch jobs or one publisher's odd scheduling quirk, not a real pattern.
What this doesn't prove
This measures when something was published, not when it was decided - a body could finish its review on a Tuesday and simply have a standing weekly publishing slot on Friday, with no intent behind the timing at all. We can't distinguish "deliberately timed to minimise attention" from "that's just when the batch job runs" from this data alone. What we can say is that the pattern is real and large enough to be worth naming, not that we know why it exists.
Reading this responsibly
This uses only the structured publish-date field every release carries, cross-referenced against the same refusal/exemption text signal used throughout this site - a document mentioning an exemption isn't necessarily one where it was the operative reason for withholding. Weekday figures (Monday through Friday) are all built on samples in the thousands; weekend figures are not and are shown for completeness rather than as a reliable comparison point.