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Countdown

Time until Black Friday

The day after Thanksgiving, so it moves with it.

Counting down to Black Friday

Friday, 27 November 2026
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Midnight at the start of Friday, 27 November 2026

Counting from your device clock.

What is Black Friday?

Black Friday is the day after American Thanksgiving, which places it between 23 and 29 November. The name comes from Philadelphia police in the 1950s or early 1960s describing the traffic chaos after the holiday, not from retailers moving into profit, which is a later and tidier story. Sales now run for most of November, but the Friday itself remains the anchor date. Since it is defined by Thanksgiving, this countdown finds the fourth Thursday in November and adds a day.

Retail timing has drifted well away from the day itself. Offers now open in the first week of November and run through the weekend to Cyber Monday, so the Friday is the peak rather than the whole event, and tracking a price over the preceding weeks is the usual advice for telling a real discount from a reset label. Physical queues have shrunk as the trade moved online. The day is now marked in Britain, Germany, Brazil and many other countries with no Thanksgiving at all, which makes the name puzzling in those places and the date harder to anticipate without the American rule behind it. Delivery networks treat the following fortnight as their heaviest of the year, so a parcel ordered in the sales joins the same queue as everything bought for Christmas.

Mexico runs El Buen Fin across the third weekend of November, a state-backed sales period that took hold there before the American date did. Gulf retailers renamed the event White Friday, since Friday is the day of communal prayer and the original name sat awkwardly. Nigeria and South Africa run it as a month of promotions rather than a day. The error made where there is no Thanksgiving is to define it as the last Friday in November: when the month opens on a Thursday the American date is the 23rd and the last Friday is the 30th, and stock and shipping are planned around the earlier one.

The next one falls on Friday, 27 November 2026, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

The name, and where it did not come from

The retail explanation, that shops move from red ink into black on the day, is a public relations rescue from the 1980s. The earlier and much better attested use is Philadelphia police and bus drivers in the 1950s and 1960s complaining about the crowds and traffic on the Friday after Thanksgiving, when the suburban shoppers and the crowd for the Army-Navy football game arrived in the city together. Local merchants disliked the term enough to try renaming it Big Friday, and got nowhere.

It spread nationally only in the 1980s and internationally in the 2010s, carried mostly by American retailers opening abroad and by marketplaces that run one calendar everywhere. Britain's first large Black Friday was in 2014, when disorder in a handful of supermarkets made the evening news and several chains withdrew from it the following year. What took hold instead was a fortnight of online discounting with a Friday somewhere in the middle, which is roughly what the American version has become as well.

Frequently asked questions

How is this countdown calculated?

The target is midnight at the start of Friday, 27 November 2026, read in your device's own time zone. The fourth Thursday in November is found first and 1 day added, so the date tracks Thanksgiving wherever that lands.

Are the discounts real?

Some are and many are not, and the only reliable test is to have watched the price beforehand. The common pattern is a reference price the item was sold at briefly, or never, against which the reduction is calculated. European Union rules now require a discount to be shown against the lowest price of the previous thirty days, and consumer bodies in several countries publish price histories each year. Goods genuinely cheaper than they have ever been are a much smaller category than the advertising implies.

When did the shops start opening on Thanksgiving itself?

From about 2011, when several American chains moved their opening into the Thursday evening and then the afternoon. The reaction was substantial: staff unions objected, and a number of retailers took to advertising the fact that they were staying shut. Most of that argument has been overtaken, because the sale now opens online at midnight or earlier and there is little reason to unlock a shop early for it. The doorbuster queue, which was the defining image of the day for twenty years, has largely gone.

Is there organised opposition to it?

Buy Nothing Day started in Vancouver in September 1992 and was moved by Adbusters onto the Friday after American Thanksgiving in 1997; Britain keeps it on the Friday itself, while several other European countries mark it on the Saturday after. Several outdoor clothing retailers have closed their shops for the day or given the takings away, which is a marketing position as much as a protest and is generally admitted to be both. The environmental objection is mostly about returns: a large share of what is bought in the sales goes back, and some of it is never resold.