When Do Black Friday Prices Drop? The 2026 Timeline

Black Friday prices don't drop on one day. In 2025, Walmart's first Black Friday event started November 14, Amazon's Black Friday Week November 20, Target's event November 23, and Walmart's main event went live online on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, with deals running through Cyber Monday. For 2026 (Thanksgiving November 26, Black Friday November 27), check daily from early November and see when each product actually hits its low.

This guide lays out the 2025 timeline from primary sources, maps it onto the 2026 calendar, and gives a script that reads your daily price snapshots and tells you the day each product reached its season low.

The 2025 timeline

Adobe's spending figures are for all US online retail, not for any one store. And spending isn't price: a busy day can be a busy day because people waited for payday, not because prices were lowest. The table tells you when deals were available, not when a given product was cheapest.

What that suggests for 2026

None of these retailers has announced 2026 dates as of October 20, 2026. In 2025, Walmart published its event dates on October 27, and Target's detailed Black Friday release came out on November 20. Expect 2026 announcements between late October and mid-November.

If retailers keep the same weekday offsets from Thanksgiving (an assumption, not an announcement), 2026 would look like this:

So a baseline that starts by late October is clean: it's before every 2025 event. A tracker that only starts in the week of Thanksgiving has no "before" to compare with.

Why you have to measure it yourself

"Prices drop on Black Friday" is an average. Product by product, the low can come earlier, later, or not at all. Which?, the UK consumer group, looked at 227 tech and appliance deals from Black Friday 2023 and found that "every one of the 'deals' we checked was available for the same price or less" at other times in the six months before or after, and around four in 10 were cheaper at some other point (Which?, 26 Nov 2024). That's UK retailers and one year, but it shows that the "best day" is product-specific.

The way to find it is a daily price snapshot per product from late October to early December. The Black Friday price tracker guide sets that up with a scheduled run of E-commerce Product Scraper Pro on Amazon, Walmart and Target, and exports the history to a price_history.csv file with these columns:

scrapedAt,site,url,name,price,originalPrice,currency,inStock,seller,changeType,previousPrice

Find the day each product hit its low

The script below works on that file. It takes the lowest price per product per US Eastern day (so it copes with several runs a day), fills in unchanged days (with onlyChanges, a product only appears on days its price or stock changed), and reports the first day each product reached its season low, how long the low lasted, and which phase of the season that day falls in.

import csv
import sys
from collections import Counter, defaultdict
from datetime import date, datetime, timedelta
from zoneinfo import ZoneInfo   # Windows: pip install tzdata

ET = ZoneInfo("America/New_York")
START, END = date(2026, 10, 21), date(2026, 12, 7)
PHASES = [  # (first day, label) for the 2026 season; edit as retailers announce dates
    (date(2026, 10, 21), "baseline (before Nov 1)"),
    (date(2026, 11, 1), "early November"),
    (date(2026, 11, 13), "pre-Thanksgiving events"),
    (date(2026, 11, 26), "Thanksgiving Day"),
    (date(2026, 11, 27), "Black Friday"),
    (date(2026, 11, 28), "weekend"),
    (date(2026, 11, 30), "Cyber Monday"),
    (date(2026, 12, 1), "after Cyber Monday"),
]

def phase(d):
    return [label for start, label in PHASES if d >= start][-1]

# Lowest price seen per product per US-Eastern day (handles several runs a day).
lows = defaultdict(dict)
names = {}
for r in csv.DictReader(open(sys.argv[1], encoding="utf-8")):
    if not r["price"]:
        continue
    day = datetime.fromisoformat(r["scrapedAt"].replace("Z", "+00:00")).astimezone(ET).date()
    p = float(r["price"])
    lows[r["url"]][day] = min(p, lows[r["url"]].get(day, p))
    names[r["url"]] = r["name"]

tally = Counter()
for url, by_day in lows.items():
    earlier = [d for d in by_day if d < START]
    series, last, d = {}, (by_day[max(earlier)] if earlier else None), START
    while d <= END:                      # carry the price forward over unchanged days
        last = by_day.get(d, last)
        if last is not None:
            series[d] = last
        d += timedelta(days=1)
    if not series:
        continue
    low = min(series.values())
    if low == max(series.values()):
        print(f"{names[url][:12]:<13} flat at {low:.2f} all season")
        continue
    low_days = [d for d, p in series.items() if p == low]
    first, last_low = low_days[0], low_days[-1]
    tally[phase(first)] += 1
    print(f"{names[url][:12]:<13} low {low:>8.2f} first {first:%a %b %d} ({phase(first)}), "
          f"held {len(low_days)} day(s) until {last_low:%b %d}")

print("\nProducts whose season low started in each phase:")
for _, label in PHASES:
    print(f"  {label:<26}{tally[label]}")

Here's the output on a made-up four-product season (the products and prices are invented to show each pattern; the file format is the real export format):

TV 1          low   399.99 first Thu Nov 26 (Thanksgiving Day), held 5 day(s) until Nov 30
Vacuum 2      low   179.00 first Fri Nov 13 (pre-Thanksgiving events), held 4 day(s) until Nov 16
Toy 3         low    39.99 first Mon Nov 30 (Cyber Monday), held 2 day(s) until Dec 01
Cable 4       flat at 7.97 all season

Products whose season low started in each phase:
  baseline (before Nov 1)   0
  early November            0
  pre-Thanksgiving events   1
  Thanksgiving Day          1
  Black Friday              0
  weekend                   0
  Cyber Monday              1
  after Cyber Monday        0

How to read it:

• TV 1 dropped in steps and reached its low on Thanksgiving Day, then held it through Cyber Monday. Waiting for Black Friday cost nothing, but waiting past Monday would have.
• Vacuum 2 was cheapest in an early event and never matched that price again. Its later "Black Friday" price was a smaller discount. This is the pattern the 2025 Walmart Event 1 dates make possible.
• Toy 3 kept falling until Cyber Monday.
• Cable 4 never moved. Plenty of products don't take part in the sales at all.

The bottom table is the one to keep. After the season, run it on your whole watchlist and you get your own answer to "when do prices drop" for the categories you care about. Keep the file: next year you can set your alerts around the phase where your products actually bottomed out.

Details that change the answer

• Time zones. scrapedAt is UTC. A drop at 11 p.m. Eastern on Thanksgiving is already Friday in UTC, which is why the script converts to Eastern before picking the day.
• Run frequency. With one run a day, a low that lasted six hours can be missed. From Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, run every few hours; the Cyber Monday deal tracker guide works out what hourly checks cost.
• Out of stock. A low price on a day the item was sold out isn't a price you could pay. If that matters, skip rows where inStock is false before computing lows.
• Is the low a real deal? A season low can still be the normal price if the item was raised beforehand. The fake Black Friday discounts guide compares it with the 30-day median and the 90-day low.
• Edit the phases. When retailers announce 2026 dates, change the PHASES list so the labels match the real events.

For the year's other sales and when to start each baseline, see the holiday sales calendar and price tracking guide, and for gift-buying after Cyber Monday, the Christmas price tracker. The free e-commerce price tracker page builds the tracking input.

Disclosure: I built the actor and this site. The script reads any CSV with these columns, whatever collected the prices.

Sources: Walmart 2025 Black Friday Deals events (Oct 27, 2025), Amazon: When is Black Friday 2025, Target press release (Nov 20, 2025), Adobe: Cyber Monday hits record (Dec 2, 2025), Which?: Black Friday deals exposed as duds (Nov 26, 2024).