Black Friday countdown

The phrase was first popular with police in Philadelphia in the 1950s and 1960s, who used it for the gridlock, crowds and shoplifting of the day after Thanksgiving, when suburban shoppers and visitors for the Army–Navy football game filled the city. Retailers disliked the gloomy label, and by the 1980s a friendlier story had spread: that this was the day stores finally moved from red ink to black, from loss to profit, for the year. That explanation came later and does not describe the origin of the term.

The name was also used much earlier for financial panics, most famously the gold market crash of September 24, 1869. Today it means only the shopping day, and the term has spread to the UK, Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, often without any Thanksgiving holiday to go with it.

Because Thanksgiving falls between November 22 and 28, Black Friday always lands between November 23 and 29. The next dates are November 27, 2026, November 26, 2027, November 24, 2028, November 23, 2029 and November 29, 2030. Cyber Monday, a name introduced by the US retail industry in 2005 for online deals, follows three days later, on November 30 in 2026.

In practice the sales no longer wait for Friday. Many large retailers start early-access deals at the beginning of November or even in October, and some promotions run through the whole Thanksgiving weekend. The countdown here marks the day itself; to work out how many days you have between payday and a sale, or until a return window closes, the days between dates calculator does the arithmetic.

Tracking prices on the items you want for a few weeks beforehand shows whether a Black Friday price is really low or just a return to normal. Online deals often start at midnight Pacific or Eastern time, so a sale that begins at 00:00 Eastern opens at 9 PM the evening before on the West Coast.