Black Friday 2026 date: November 27, and how the deals work
Black Friday 2026 is November 27 and Cyber Monday November 30. Why the date moves, where the name came from, how deals are priced and which scams to watch.
Why it matters
Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping events of the year in the US and many other countries, and studies show many advertised discounts are not the lowest prices of the year.
Black Friday 2026 is on Friday, November 27, and Cyber Monday follows on November 30. Adobe expects Americans to spend $12.9 billion online on Black Friday alone. Consumer researchers keep finding, though, that most “deals” that day can be matched at other times of the year.
Quick answer: Black Friday is the day after US Thanksgiving, which is always the fourth Thursday of November. In 2026 Thanksgiving is November 26, so Black Friday is November 27 and Cyber Monday is November 30. The date can fall anywhere from November 23 to November 29.
The name started as a complaint from Philadelphia police, not a retail slogan. The sales spread from the US to the UK, India, Pakistan, Nigeria and dozens of other countries, and so did the scams that follow them.
Why Black Friday 2026 falls on November 27
Black Friday has no fixed date of its own. It hangs on Thanksgiving, which US federal law (5 U.S.C. 6103) sets as “the fourth Thursday in November.” November 2026 begins on a Sunday, so its Thursdays are the 5th, 12th, 19th and 26th.
Cyber Monday is simply the Monday after. The five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday are what retailers and analysts call Cyber Week or the “Cyber 5.”
| Year | Thanksgiving (US) | Black Friday | Cyber Monday |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Thursday, Nov 26 | Friday, Nov 27 | Monday, Nov 30 |
| 2027 | Thursday, Nov 25 | Friday, Nov 26 | Monday, Nov 29 |
| 2028 | Thursday, Nov 23 | Friday, Nov 24 | Monday, Nov 27 |
Source: US federal holiday rule (5 U.S.C. 6103); dates calculated by The Daily Summit.
Black Friday is not a federal holiday. Our explainer on why Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday covers how Congress fixed that rule in 1941.
In practice “Black Friday” now means a season. Big retailers start promotions weeks earlier. In the UK in 2024, the consumer group Which? counted the sales period as running from November 15 to December 12.
Where did the name Black Friday come from?
Most people have heard that Black Friday is the day shops finally go “into the black,” or turn a profit. Language researchers say that story came later; Taylor-Blake has called it an invented explanation.
The best documented origin is Philadelphia in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Police officers used “Black Friday” for the day after Thanksgiving because crowds of shoppers and visitors jammed the city center. The Army-Navy college football game, played in Philadelphia on the Saturday after Thanksgiving for many years, brought in even more people. Officers worked long shifts, and shoplifting rose.
- November 1951: The trade magazine Factory Management and Maintenance uses “Black Friday” for the day after Thanksgiving, but about workers calling in sick, not shopping.
- 1961: A public relations newsletter describes Philadelphia merchants trying to rename the day “Big Friday” because the police nickname sounded bad. The effort failed, according to researcher Bonnie Taylor-Blake, who found the document.
- 1966: Retail historian Michael Lisicky has said Philadelphia police coined the term that year; other researchers date police use a few years earlier.
- November 2005: Shop.org, the online arm of the US National Retail Federation (NRF), names “Cyber Monday” in a press release after members reported an online sales spike that day.
How Black Friday discounts are priced
A Black Friday discount is a claim about two prices: the sale price and a “was” or “list” price it is compared against. The second number decides how big the deal looks, and it is the one regulators argue about.
In the US, the Federal Trade Commission’s Guides Against Deceptive Pricing (16 C.F.R. Part 233) say a former price used in a comparison should be “the actual, bona fide price” at which the item was offered to the public on a regular basis, for a reasonably substantial period. A comparison against an inflated price that was rarely charged is what the guides call a fictitious former price.
The European Union is stricter on paper. Since May 28, 2022, Article 6a of the EU Price Indication Directive (added by the so-called Omnibus Directive) has required any announced price cut to be measured against the lowest price the seller charged in at least the 30 days before. That means a Black Friday price can then become the reference point for a Christmas sale weeks later.
The UK, outside the EU since 2020, works differently. Its Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 gave the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) power to fine firms directly for misleading pricing from April 2025. The CMA had argued that a “was” price was misleading if too few items sold at it, proposing that no more than two units sell at the lower price for each one sold at the higher price. On July 30, 2026, the High Court in London rejected that fixed 1:2 ratio as unworkable in a case against the mattress seller Emma Sleep, according to published analyses by the law firms Fieldfisher and TLT. Sales volumes still count as evidence, the court said, but not on their own. Emma admitted some narrower breaches, including showing a struck-through price for a product never sold at that price.
What price-tracking studies have found
Which?, the UK consumer group, tracked 175 home, tech and health appliances at eight retailers (Amazon, AO, Argos, Boots, Currys, John Lewis, Richer Sounds and Very) from May 2024 to May 2025. It published the results on November 25, 2025.
It found that 83% of the products were the same price or cheaper on at least one occasion outside the four-week Black Friday sales window. None of the deals it analyzed was at its lowest price only on Black Friday itself. The share varied by retailer, from 94% at John Lewis to 55% at Richer Sounds.
Which? retail editor Reena Sewraz called Black Friday “a false economy” for most shoppers. Which? has published similar findings for earlier sales, so the pattern is not a one-year quirk.
Price tracking cannot show whether a product is good value, only whether the sale price was unusual. The other 17% of products in the Which? sample were cheapest during the sales window, so some deals were real.
How much do people spend on Black Friday?
US figures come from two main trackers that measure different things. The NRF surveys shoppers about how many shopped and what they spent. Adobe Digital Insights measures online spending directly from retailer website data.
| Measure | Figure | Who measured |
|---|---|---|
| Thanksgiving-to-Cyber Monday shoppers, 2025 | 202.9 million (record) | NRF and Prosper Insights |
| Average spend per shopper, 2025 weekend | $337.86 | NRF and Prosper Insights |
| Black Friday online sales, 2025 | $11.8 billion (+9.1%) | Adobe |
| Cyber Monday online sales, 2025 | $14.25 billion (+7.1%) | Adobe |
| Black Friday online sales, 2026 forecast | $12.9 billion (+9.2%) | Adobe |
| Cyber Monday online sales, 2026 forecast | $15.1 billion (+6.2%) | Adobe |
Source: NRF, December 2, 2025; Adobe, December 2025 and September 2026.
Black Friday is still the busiest day for physical stores in the NRF count: 80.3 million people shopped in stores that day in 2025, slightly fewer than in 2024. Cyber Monday is the bigger online day. Adobe called Cyber Monday 2025 the largest online shopping day it has recorded and forecasts $47.5 billion online across the 2026 Cyber 5, out of $275.1 billion for November 1 to December 31.
All of these figures are in nominal dollars. They are not adjusted for inflation, so part of each year’s growth is higher prices rather than more goods bought.
What scams do officials warn about around Black Friday?
US consumers reported losing $15.9 billion to fraud in 2025 across about 3 million reports, the FTC told Congress on March 25, 2026, up from just over $12 billion in 2024. The FTC lists online shopping among the most commonly reported fraud types.
In the UK, about £11.8 million (roughly $16 million) was lost to online shopping fraud between November 1, 2024, and January 31, 2025, according to City of London Police data cited by police forces in Devon and Cornwall and the Thames Valley. The previous season’s figure was more than £11.5 million, with an average loss of £695 (about $920) per victim, according to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and Action Fraud, the UK’s national fraud reporting service. Social media was the platform named most often in those reports.
The pressure of a ticking clock is the common thread. Action Fraud deputy head Adam Mercer has called a false sense of urgency “a tell-tale sign of a fraudster.”
The FTC’s consumer advice and the NCSC’s Black Friday guidance list these checks for spotting a fake shop or deal:
- Look up the seller by searching its name with words like “review,” “complaint” or “scam,” and read reviews on independent sites, not only on the shop’s own page.
- Treat big discounts on big brands with suspicion, since the FTC warns that brand-name goods at bargain prices may be counterfeit or stolen.
- Do not trust the padlock alone. The FTC notes that “https” means the connection is encrypted, not that the site is real.
- Read the refund and return terms before paying; the FTC flags sites that do not clearly say whether a full refund is possible.
- Check how the seller wants to be paid. Both agencies warn against bank transfers, and the FTC says a seller insisting on gift cards, wire transfers, payment apps or cryptocurrency is a warning sign. Credit cards carry dispute rights.
- Report it to ReportFraud.ftc.gov in the US or Action Fraud in the UK if something goes wrong.
Black Friday outside the US
The day traveled with online retail. In most countries it arrived through a website, not a shopping mall.
United Kingdom. Amazon brought Black Friday promotions to its UK site in 2010. By 2014 scenes in British supermarkets made national news, with police called to several Tesco stores after scuffles over discounted goods. Asda, which had pushed the event hard, said it would skip Black Friday in 2015, and much of the UK shopping shifted online.
India. India’s biggest online sales come earlier, in the weeks before Diwali, through events such as Flipkart’s Big Billion Days and Amazon’s Great Indian Festival. Black Friday is a smaller, later push, mainly from fashion and lifestyle apps such as Myntra, which marketers have tried to build up to fill the slower weeks after Diwali.
Pakistan. Daraz, the online marketplace, held Pakistan’s first big Black Friday sale in 2015. A rival, HomeShopping.pk, answered with “White Friday,” arguing the word “black” did not suit Friday, the day of congregational prayer for Muslims. Its event page put it as “in Pakistan, Friday is never black.” Critics said it was the same sale in a different color, and the company’s chief executive, Shayan Tahir, said the aim was to stand out, not to use religion.
Nigeria. The online retailer Jumia introduced Black Friday to Nigerian shoppers in November 2013, according to Nigerian media accounts; the same reports say its site drew more than a million visitors that first year. Some Nigerian platforms now stretch the event across the whole of November.
How to read Black Friday news in 2026
Two kinds of numbers will arrive after November 30. NRF’s shopper count is a survey, so it shows how many people took part. Adobe’s figures track online spending and are not adjusted for inflation, so a 9% rise does not mean 9% more goods.
Watch for: Adobe’s tally of 2026 Black Friday and Cyber Monday online sales against its forecasts of $12.9 billion and $15.1 billion, and whether the CMA issues new UK guidance on “was” prices after losing its 1:2 test in the Emma Sleep case.
This article is for information only and is not financial or legal advice.
