The joint photographic expert group (JPEG) is a widely used lossy compression format for digital images, facilitating transmission and storage on the Internet. This paper proposes a reversible data hiding method based on optimal zero alternating current (AC) coefficients shifting for JPEG images. The proposed method decomposes a cover JPEG image to retrieve 8 × 8 quantized discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficient blocks. Each block is scanned in zigzag order and divided into two regions with different DCT frequencies. One contains some lower-frequency DCT coefficients called as embedding region, and the other contains middle and high-frequency DCT coefficients called as non-embedding region. To achieve high imperceptibility under a given payload, an optimal zero AC coefficient selection strategy is employed in the embedding region. This strategy determines the location of zero AC coefficients that occur most frequently across all blocks, prioritizing the shifting of these zero AC coefficients for data embedding. Since zero AC coefficients located in low-frequency components correspond to small quantization steps, image quality remains visually good. Additionally, our method avoids shifting zero AC coefficients in high-frequency components, resulting in a minimal increase in file storage size. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method significantly outperforms previous works in terms of the embedding capacity and the image quality.