Time until Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday is the Monday after American Thanksgiving, four days later, which can land it in the first days of December. The National Retail Federation coined the term in 2005 after noticing that online orders spiked when people got back to fast office connections after the holiday weekend. Home broadband has removed the original reason, but the date stuck and is now one of the largest online shopping days of the year. It is calculated here from the fourth Thursday in November.

For a buyer, the day is roughly the last point at which standard delivery still clears comfortably before the middle of December, which is why it matters beyond its discounts. Retailers use it to shift stock that did not move over the weekend, so the categories on offer are often different from the Friday. Because the rule is four days after the fourth Thursday in November, the date can land on 1 or 2 December, and a marketing calendar built on the assumption that it always falls in November will be wrong in those years. Payment and fraud teams treat the Monday as one of their heaviest days and card issuers decline more transactions than usual. Traffic on corporate networks also rises, which was the original observation behind the name.

China's Singles' Day on 11 November is a much larger online event: the date began as a Nanjing University students' joke in 1993, and Alibaba turned it into a sale in 2009, four years after Cyber Monday was named. Germany stretches the idea into a Cyber Week, and several other European markets now treat the Monday as the closing day of a longer sale rather than an occasion of its own. Australia and New Zealand took it up later still. What people get wrong is the ranking: this is the busiest online day in the United States rather than worldwide, so a global logistics plan built on it misses the Asian peak by between two and three weeks.

The next one falls on Monday, 30 November 2026, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

The term was coined by the online arm of the National Retail Federation in 2005, in a release observing that internet sales rose sharply on the Monday after Thanksgiving. The explanation offered at the time was that people went back to work and used office connections far faster than the dial-up they had at home. That reason evaporated within a few years, but retailers wanted an online counterpart to the Friday and the date has comfortably outlived its own justification.

It has since been absorbed into a longer sale. Most large retailers now run from the start of November through to the Monday and treat it as the closing day rather than a separate event, and several markets have stretched the name across a whole week. The mix of goods differs from the Friday's, with electronics, subscriptions and travel doing better, partly because whatever failed to sell over the weekend is repriced for it.