Black Friday

What is Black Friday?

This year: Black Friday 2026 is on Friday 27 November. See the Black Friday 2026 page for this year’s date, theme and what’s on.

Black Friday is always the Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States, and Thanksgiving is always the fourth Thursday of November. That rule puts Black Friday on Friday 27 November 2026, Friday 26 November 2027 and Friday 24 November 2028. It is a retail sales event rather than an awareness day, and there is no organiser or official body behind it. In the UK it is not a bank holiday, shops and offices open as normal, and the “day” has stretched into a month of discounting that runs from late October to Cyber Monday.

Black Friday is the day when retailers in the United States, the UK and many other countries run their biggest pre-Christmas promotions. It began as a single day of in-store bargains the morning after the American Thanksgiving holiday. Today it is a season: most large UK retailers open their Black Friday sales in the first week of November or earlier, keep them running through the weekend, and close them after Cyber Monday.

Because no organisation owns the event, there is no official theme, no campaign and no formal rules. What counts as a “Black Friday deal” is decided by each retailer, which is why the Office for National Statistics and the consumer group Which? are the most useful independent sources on how much the UK spends and how good the discounts really are.

When is Black Friday and how the date is set

The date is fixed by the US federal holiday calendar. Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday of November each year, and Black Friday is the following day. Because the fourth Thursday can land anywhere between 22 and 28 November, Black Friday always falls between 23 and 29 November. The UK uses the same date, even though Thanksgiving itself is not marked here.

Two related days sit either side of it. Cyber Monday is the Monday after Black Friday and was created in the US in 2005 to promote online deals. In the UK, Small Business Saturday is on the first Saturday of December, a week later than its American counterpart, which falls on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Black Friday is not a bank holiday anywhere in the UK. The GOV.UK bank holiday list has nothing in November; the next holidays after the summer are Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

A short history

The name comes from Philadelphia. In the 1950s and 1960s police there used “Black Friday” for the day after Thanksgiving, when crowds of shoppers and visitors arriving for the Saturday Army-Navy football game clogged the streets and stretched officers’ shifts. Retailers disliked the label and in the 1980s pushed a friendlier story: that this was the day the year’s accounts moved from red ink into the black. The tidier version stuck.

The UK came to it late. Amazon ran the first British Black Friday promotions online in 2010. In 2013 Asda, then owned by Walmart, brought it into stores, and in 2014 most big chains followed. That year produced the images still associated with the day: midnight queues, crushes around discounted televisions and websites failing under demand. Asda stepped back in 2015, and UK retailers have since moved to longer, calmer, online-led sales. By the late 2010s Black Friday had overtaken the Boxing Day sales as the UK’s biggest shopping event.

Black Friday in the UK: what the numbers say

The ONS measures the effect each year in its November retail sales bulletin. For November 2025, when Black Friday fell on 28 November, it reported that non-seasonally adjusted sales volumes rose by 11.9 per cent over the month, a fairly typical Black Friday jump, while the seasonally adjusted figure fell by 0.1 per cent, which it read as a slightly weaker effect than usual. Its household survey found that around three in ten adults (31 per cent) planned to shop in the sales, with 19 per cent intending to spend less than the year before and 10 per cent more.

Which? tracks prices rather than volumes. Its research published on 25 November 2025 followed 175 home, tech and health products at Amazon, AO, Argos, Boots, Currys, John Lewis, Richer Sounds and Very for a full year around the 2024 sale. It found that 83 per cent of products were cheaper or the same price at some point outside the four-week sales period, and that on Black Friday itself none of the products was at its cheapest price of the year. The lesson is not that there are no bargains, but that the date alone guarantees nothing.

When UK retailers usually open their sales

Retailers confirm their dates in October and November, so for the current year’s confirmed timings see the Black Friday 2026 page. The pattern from 2025 shows how early the season now starts.

In other words, the “Black Friday” badge is on products for four to five weeks, and the Friday is simply the day with the most attention. Some retailers add a price promise for the period, such as Argos’s guarantee that a badged price will not fall before Christmas, which is worth reading before buying early.

How to approach it sensibly

• Decide what you need first. Write the list before the sales open, with the price you would be happy to pay. Discounts on things you were not going to buy are not savings.
• Check the price history. The Which? findings above are the reason. Free price-tracking tools show what a product has cost over the past year, so you can tell a genuine drop from a recently raised “was” price.
• Know your rights. For most online purchases in the UK you have 14 days from delivery to cancel for any reason, and faulty goods are covered by the Consumer Rights Act whatever the sale label says. Shop returns policies vary, so check them for gifts.
• Be wary of pressure. Countdown timers, “only two left” labels and lightning deals are designed to shorten thinking time. If a deal is good at 9am it is usually still good at lunchtime.

For small businesses, charities and workplaces

Independent shops cannot usually match the discounts of the national chains, and many choose not to try. Instead they lean on the week after: Small Business Saturday on the first Saturday of December, now in its thirteenth year in the UK, and Giving Tuesday, the global day of giving that follows Cyber Monday. Charities use the same weekend to ask supporters to give rather than spend, and a few brands mark Buy Nothing Day, which falls on the same Friday, by closing their websites or donating the day’s takings.

Related days

• Thanksgiving, the US holiday on the fourth Thursday of November that sets the date.
• Cyber Monday, the Monday after Black Friday, now the close of most UK sales.
• Giving Tuesday, the Tuesday after Cyber Monday, a day for giving rather than spending.
• Boxing Day, 26 December, the traditional start of the UK winter sales.