Black Friday 2026 falls on Friday 27 November. Thanksgiving is the 26th, and Cyber Monday is the 30th.
That is the easy part. The harder and more useful question is whether that Friday is actually the day to buy — and having tracked and published more than 200 individual tech deals across November and December 2025, we can answer that with prices rather than guesses.
The short version: in 2025, Black Friday itself was frequently not the lowest price of the season.
What our 2025 price tracking actually showed
Across the products we covered, the genuine floor landed in one of three windows — and the middle one was the least reliable.
| Product | Lowest price seen | When | Versus Black Friday |
|---|
| M4 MacBook Air | $749 | 5 Nov | 3 weeks early |
| LG B5 OLED TV | $530 | 1 Nov | Early — it was $600 on 19 Nov |
| Google Pixel Buds Pro 2 | $169 | 5 Nov | Early |
| Meta Quest 3S | $249 | 14 Nov | Early |
| Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses | $224 | 4 Dec | After — $239 on Black Friday |
| Apple Watch Series 11 | $329 | 2 Dec | After, explicitly beating Black Friday |
| iPad A16 | $274 | 1 Dec | After — $279 on 25 Nov |
| Apple AirPods 4 (ANC) | $99 | 5 Dec | Well after |
| Nintendo Switch 2 | $449 | 6 Dec | After, in a surprise cyber-week cut |
| Amazon Echo Frames | $115 | 30 Nov | Cyber Monday weekend |
Ten of the most-wanted products of the season, and not one of them hit its floor on Black Friday itself.
Why the day has stopped mattering
Three things have changed, and they all push the real discounts away from the Friday.
Retailers start in October now. Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart all run early sales events, and the stock allocated to them is real. The M4 MacBook Air result above is the clean example: its all-time low landed on 5 November and was never beaten.
Cyber week has swallowed the weekend. What used to be a one-day online event now runs from Thanksgiving through the following Friday. Several 2025 floors — Ray-Ban Meta, the Apple Watch, the iPad — landed in that tail.
Price-matching has flattened the peak. When every major retailer matches within hours, nobody can hold a dramatic one-day price. Discounts spread out instead of spiking.
Where Black Friday still wins
It is not dead, and two categories genuinely bottom out on the day:
- TVs. Doorbuster TV pricing is still real, still tied to the day, and still limited in stock. The LG B5's early-November price was an exception, not the rule
- Store-brand and house-brand electronics. Amazon devices, Best Buy's Insignia, Walmart's onn — these follow the traditional pattern closely
- Bundles. Console and accessory bundles tend to appear on the day rather than before it
What to do in each category
Buy early (October–mid November): laptops, flagship phones, headphones, tablets. These get deep early-event pricing and rarely improve.
Wait for the day: TVs, house-brand electronics, console bundles.
Wait until after: smart glasses, smartwatches, wearables, and anything Apple that did not move early. In 2025 this window produced four of the ten floors above.
The practical rule
Do not organise your buying around one Friday. Decide what you want in October, note the price you would be happy to pay, and buy when something crosses it — because the evidence from last season is that the crossing point is as likely to be 5 November or 4 December as it is 27 November.
The one exception worth setting an alarm for is a TV.
Key dates for 2026
| Event | Date |
|---|
| Early sales events begin | Mid-October |
| Thanksgiving | Thursday 26 November |
| Black Friday | Friday 27 November |
| Small Business Saturday | Saturday 28 November |
| Cyber Monday | Monday 30 November |
| Cyber week tail | Through Friday 4 December |
We will be tracking prices across all of it, as we did last year.
