How do I sort YouTube videos by date?

Last reviewed: September 29, 2026 · Markdown version

Inside one channel, yes: its Videos tab has a Latest, Popular and Oldest switch. Across YouTube as a whole, not really — search lets you filter by upload date, and in the version we checked it offered no newest-first ordering. Some of this is in YouTube's help and some of it is only on the live site, so each part below says which.

Inside one channel: Latest, Popular, Oldest

YouTube's help on channel pages tells you to “select a video type at the top of the page”, with tabs that vary by channel and “may include” Videos, Shorts and Live (YouTube Help: Find your way around YouTube channel pages, read 28 September 2026). It describes no ordering control on those tabs.

The site itself has one. On the web, a channel's Videos tab carried three buttons — Latest, Popular and Oldest — with Latest already selected (checked 28 September 2026 on YouTube's own channel, signed out). So:

Open the channel. From any of its videos, YouTube's help says to “click the channel name under the description”.
Choose the Videos tab (or Shorts, or Live, depending on what you are after).
Pick Oldest to start from the beginning, or leave it on Latest.

Because this is observed rather than documented, the labels may differ in the mobile app or change later. Oldest is the one people usually want, for watching a series or a channel's back catalogue in order.

Across YouTube: a date filter, not a date sort

Search is where people expect a “newest first” button, and it is not quite there. YouTube's Android help says “You can filter videos by factors like upload date, type, and duration”: search, tap Filters, then choose options “like Upload Date, Duration, and Subtitles/CC” (YouTube Help: Advanced search (Filters), Android, read 28 September 2026). The iPhone version lists “upload date, view count, and duration” (YouTube Help: Advanced search (Filters), iOS version, read 28 September 2026). The computer version of the same article only describes filtering “by the type of content (like video, short, movie, playlist, or channel)” (YouTube Help: Advanced search (Filters), Computer, read 28 September 2026).

What we saw on the web the same day: the Filters panel had an Upload date group — Today, This week, This month, This year — and a Prioritize group offering Relevance and Popularity (checked 28 September 2026). There was no option to put results in date order. The difference matters: a filter hides anything outside the window, and within it YouTube still chooses the order.

Our tip: pair a narrow window, such as This week, with specific search words. That gets you close to “latest videos about X” without a true sort.

The feed that is already about recent uploads

If what you want is the newest videos from channels you follow, you do not need a sort at all. YouTube: the “Subscriptions feed, available on both mobile and a computer, will show any recently uploaded videos from your subscriptions” (YouTube Help: Subscribe to YouTube channels, read 28 September 2026). That page does not state what order the feed uses, so we won't either. If yours looks wrong, the feed has its own checklist.

For a single channel outside YouTube's interface, its RSS feed is another date-ordered view — measured newest first on that page, and limited to recent uploads.

Sorting channels, not videos

A different question hides in this one: sorting the channels you follow by when each last posted. The same subscriptions help describes one control on that list — “You can go to a list of your channels by tapping All, and filter your results using the drop-down arrow at the top” (YouTube Help: Subscribe to YouTube channels, read 28 September 2026) — and does not describe a sort by activity. How to work around that by hand is covered in organizing and sorting your subscriptions, and the specific case of channels that went silent is in finding channels that stopped uploading.