Black Friday 2023

Black Friday 2023 is on Friday, November 24, 2023 (in 176 days).  Calendar for 2023

Black Friday is the informal name used to mark the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Black Friday follows Thanksgiving Day, a national holiday in the United States celebrated annually on the fourth Thursday of November, and always falls between November 23 and November 29.

In recent years Black Friday has become the busiest shopping day (for in-store foot traffic) of the year in the United States. Many retailers offer large discounts to entice shoppers into stores and start off the shopping season. It is routinely the day with the highest retail turnover of the year and an important indicator for the Christmas business. While it is not an official holiday, many non-retail employees and schools have both Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday off, which, together with the regular weekend that follows, creates a four-day long weekend.

The Christmas shopping season that starts on Black Friday also encompasses:

• Buy Nothing Day, an international day of protest against consumerism, held on the same day as Black Friday
• Small Business Saturday, created as a counterpart to Black Friday and Cyber Monday to encourage shoppers to visit small and local shops, held the day after Black Friday
• Cyber Monday, a marketing term created by online retailers to encourage online shopping, held on the Monday after Black Friday
• Giving Tuesday, an international day of charitable giving, held the day after Cyber Monday
• Super Saturday (also known as Panic Saturday), the name given to the Saturday before Christmas Eve which (unofficially) marks the end of the Christmas shopping season

Despite being the biggest shopping day of the year in the US, Black Friday's number of shoppers and transaction volume are now only a fraction of China's Singles' Day, which has become the biggest shopping event in the world.

Historically, "Black Friday" is used as a term for often catastrophic events that happened on a Friday. See this list of Black Fridays through history.

Further reading: Black Friday (shopping) on Wikipedia

Black Friday 2024 is on Friday, November 29, 2024 (in 547 days).  Calendar for 2024

Dates of Black Friday 2023 and surrounding years as downloadable image file