By Mashable | Created at 2026-10-17 09:11:59 | Updated at 2026-10-19 08:49:03
1 day ago
You can find a TV on sale any given day, but you'll find the best deals at certain times of the year.
By
Leah Stodart
Senior Shopping Reporter
Leah Stodart is a Philadelphia-based Senior Shopping Reporter at Mashable where she covers and tests essential home tech like vacuums, TVs, beauty devices, and eco-friendly hacks. Her ever-evolving experience in these categories helps her make thoughtful recommendations for how to spend your money during shopping holidays like Black Friday, which Leah has been covering for Mashable since 2017.
on October 17, 2026
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Whether you want a bigger screen, better streaming or gaming quality, or just the cheapest decent option, there's a way to shop strategically. Credit: Ian Moore / Mashable
Table of Contents
You can find a TV on sale any given day of the year, but the real record-low sale prices tend to follow an (unofficial) schedule. So, when is the best time to buy a TV?
Of course, you could probably guess that Black Friday and Prime Day are high up on the list, but those aren't the only good times to score a big screen at a massive discount. There are a few other times the TV deals will really wow you throughout the year, like during football season or in the spring when the new TVs of the year are finally hitting shelves. It's kind of like a "once per season" thing.
TV pricing tends to follow a yearly cycle of sorts: The upcoming main sale window will likely match or beat the best deals from the previous one. For example, Prime Big Deal Days 2026 just outpriced most of the best TV deals we saw during Prime Day proper in June. But many of those Prime Big Deal Days prices will likely be beaten by Black Friday.
Given how big an investment they are, understanding the peaks of the TV calendar is a crucial chapter in the unofficial TV buyer's guide. Let's break down the best months of the year to find TV deals. And if you could use a breakdown of what the heck a QLED or mini LED TV even is before making your purchase, my TV specs explainer lays it all out.
The No. 1 best time to buy a TV: Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Months: Late October, November, and early to mid-December
People may not be ready to throw hands in a Best Buy parking lot at 4 a.m., but Black Friday TV deals are still unmatched — they just don't require you to leave the house at the crack of dawn.
Black Friday is trending toward a month-long affair at this point, with retailers shifting into Black Friday mode online as early as October. The extended time frame raises the question of whether TV sale prices will drop even further closer to Black Friday. Thankfully, most of the big retailers are up front about early deals. Best Buy and Samsung will straight-up tag certain deals as Black Friday deals if they drop before the big day, letting buyers know there's no need to hold out until the week of Thanksgiving.
This is an especially auspicious time for budget shoppers looking for the cheapest possible version of a 4K TV at a certain size. During Black Friday, basic budget-friendly 4K TVs are typically the doorbusters that sell out soon after they drop — and are much less likely to return in the next few months.
In-store or not, Best Buy TV deals during Black Friday include elite prices on TVs 65 inches or larger. You can save hundreds on high-end QLEDs and OLEDs. You'll also find big-screen budget QLEDs at shockingly low prices. Walmart also stays in the mix with a handful of wild doorbuster deals on the best cheap TVs, while Amazon mostly caters to the affordable TV crowd, focusing most on its own Fire TVs and brands like Hisense and TCL.
Post-holiday sales and New Year sales are absolutely a thing, but you can be confident that most TV prices are generally better before Christmas than after. We've seen firsthand how TV sale prices quietly go up by $100 to $200 during post-holiday sales. However, if you miss the Black Friday-Cyber Monday season, another chance to save on TVs is around the corner.
The second-best time to find TV deals: NFL playoff season
Months: Mid-January to early February
Waiting for the festive hustle and bustle to pass is definitely a strategy to save in some categories. So, are TVs cheaper after the holidays?
The answer is technically yes, but not in the "after-Christmas sales" way that you're thinking. By "after the holidays," we mean the last few weeks of football season. Football-fueled TV deals kick off near the start of the NFL playoffs (sometime in mid to late January) and last until the big game (some in early to mid-February).
It makes sense that TV deals are pushed so hard during the lead-up to the most-watched sporting event in the U.S. Hosting a watch party is a perfect excuse to upgrade to a bigger screen. Or maybe it's the fact that the last 18 weeks of the regular season have brought you to your breaking point with your current TV. The field looks washed out, small details like the score bug are pixelated, the glare from your windows makes afternoon games unbearable — whatever the issue, TV brands aren't about to let this opportunity pass.
Football playoff deals tend to spotlight TVs that are good for watching sports: i.e., big-screen QLED TVs, plus some of the brighter OLED TVs of the year. The vibrant lighting supplied by a QLED panel is ideal for following small details like a ball or a tiny score box, as well as for highlighting the brightness of the team's colors and the field, making your experience feel as live and in-person as possible. It's not uncommon for most of these deals to be identical to what we saw on Black Friday, or, in some cases, to drop even further in price due to the proximity to CES. (Read more about that below.)
The third-best time to find TV deals: Spring
Months: March and April
The annual TV release cycle mostly revolves around CES: a Las Vegas-based tech trade show where the latest and greatest consumer tech is unveiled to gadget enthusiasts. This is where brands like Samsung, LG, TCL, and Hisense show off their new TV designs for the year. Sony doesn't always participate in CES, but its TV announcement and release cycle still has similar timing.
While these fresh new TVs aren't the ones getting major discounts, their existence does trigger major price cuts on the previous year's flagship TVs. These deals pop up not when the TVs are announced at the event in January, but once they start being officially released to the public in the spring.
Surprisingly, it's not that uncommon to see small discounts on the brand-new models in their first few months on the market.
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The fourth-best time to find TV deals: Prime Day
Month: June or July
Amazon stands out as a TV destination during the shopping holidays it made up for itself: Prime Day and Prime Big Deal Days (basically a second Prime Day). The summer sale was consistently held in July until 2026, when Amazon bumped Prime Day to June.
Naturally, Fire TVs are the focal point during Prime events — we've seen a 43-inch Amazon Omni 4K Fire TV drop below $100 during Prime Big Deal Days. Prime Day is packed with unbelievably cheap QLED TVs (in price, not quality) from Hisense or TCL, even in the big sizes.
But many of the best Prime Day TV deals aren't actually at Amazon. They're at Best Buy, which loves to hold a mega sale conveniently during the same week as Prime Day. Best Buy is the best place to shop for a TV if you're looking for a higher-end model from Samsung, LG, or Sony, such as a flagship OLED or an RGB TV.
Does a TV deal seem too good to be true? Check its price history.
Pro Amazon tip: Any time you spot a seemingly good discount, you can confirm you're actually getting a good deal by checking its price history on camelcamelcamel, a free Amazon price-tracking site. Just copy and paste the URL to get a graph showing that TV's price fluctuations over the past year or so, plus confirmation of its lowest sale price ever on Amazon. If the deal you're currently eyeing doesn't match that, it's probably best to wait — that record-low price is sure to pop up during one of the peak sale times we just discussed.
There's also a Walmart price tracker now: Camelmart, obviously. Hopefully, Best Buy's is next.
As a good rule of thumb: If a deal seems too good to be true, there's a good chance it is. But don't underestimate how steep TV discounts can get, either.
Frequently Asked Questions
If your TV is 43 inches or smaller, you can take your old TV to a Best Buy store to recycle. Best Buy also recycles Best Buy brand TVs (like Insignia) under 50 inches for free and charges a $29.99 fee for all other TVs. Trashing an old TV or otherwise sending it to a landfill via junk pickup service should always be a last resort.
Pretty much, yeah. Any TV bought brand new since the late 2010s is almost guaranteed to be a smart TV, and smart TVs are so solidly the norm now that you'd probably only be able to find one at a yard sale or on eBay.
Have a trusty older model that's still kicking? You can turn a normal TV into a smart TV by buying an external streaming device like an Amazon Fire TV Stick or Roku player. These WiFi-enabled devices plug into a TV's HDMI port and provide a makeshift smart TV platform to access streaming apps when the TV's input selection is that HDMI port.
All three refer to a TV's lighting situation behind the screen, which affects things like how bright the TV gets, how well HDR support is utilized, how contrasted shadows are and how legible dark content is, and how rich colors are. The tech you'll like the best depends on the type of content and the lighting of the room in which you'll be using the TV the most. Here's a quick TV lighting guide:
LED (light-emitting diode) is the baseline. Despite their general affordability across the board, one LED TV can beat another out by incorporating full-array local dimming: a collection of lighting zones that adjust independently across the entire screen. Without those crucial in-between zones, the middle of the screen of many cheaper LED TVs can get a little hazy, falling victim to edge-lit dimming that just can't extend light across with the same oomph.
QLED is a luminous spin on traditional LED. The "Q" refers to an extra layer of quantum dots sandwiched between the standard LED panel and the screen to make a wider range of colors pop off the screen with enhanced brightness. The juicier picture is ideal for viewing or gaming in bright rooms and for honing in on content with small details, like sports. (Not every brand refers to their quantum dot TVs as QLED. While Samsung and TCL refer to QLED as QLED, brands like LG, Sony, and Hisense use similar technology marketed under different names (QNED, Triluminos Pro, and ULED, respectively).
Mini LEDs have also entered the chat in recent years. These are about half the size of regular LEDs, allowing manufacturers to pack more LEDs into the same size panel, allowing for more local dimming zones and more precise tweaking of brightness in each area.
OLED is its own thing, despite the negligible difference in the title letters itself. Unlike LED and QLED, OLED doesn't require an external backlight. That's because the pixels — the organic light-emitting diodes that represent the "O" in OLED — emit their own light instead. This comes in handy during dark scenes, when the TV screen needs to get as dark as possible to differentiate shadowy shades from each other. While backlit QLED pixels' forced dimming can cause a kind of halo effect around bright objects, OLED pixels can turn off completely. This makes OLED the gold standard for the stark contrast and black uniformity needed for viewing or gaming in dark rooms.
Also unlike QLEDs, OLED TVs are the least likely to come in budget-friendly options.
LED, QLED, and OLED have nothing to do with the screen's resolution (that's what HD, 4K, and 8K are for). This means that the frequently asked question, whether 4K or QLED is better, isn't really a question at all, because the two aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, nearly every QLED TV is 4K (with some 8K options sprinkled in, but 8K is overkill for nearly any household situation right now). While any rendition of LED refers to the light source behind the TV, 4K refers to the screen's resolution, or how many pixels are squeezed across the screen horizontally (4,000-ish).
Some 32-inch and 40-inch 4K TVs do exist, but 43 inches is the smallest that most 4K TVs run — and because 4K is the market standard now (over HD), most 43-inch TVs at any price point are going to be 4K anyway.
43 inches is also the smallest size where 4K (3840 x 2160 pixels) is even worthwhile in a TV. While a 15-inch 4K laptop screen makes sense because you're looking at it from just a foot or two away, you're unlikely to notice the resolution benefits of 4K on a screen smaller than 43 inches when you're sitting several feet away. Once you get past 40 inches, the TV is large enough to really showcase the crisp details that 4K provides, making small details like a football score or subtitles more legible, especially if you're watching from several feet away.
Leah Stodart is a Philadelphia-based Senior Shopping Reporter at Mashable where she covers and tests essential home tech like vacuums, TVs, beauty devices, and eco-friendly hacks. Her ever-evolving experience in these categories helps her make thoughtful recommendations for how to spend your money during shopping holidays like Black Friday, which Leah has been covering for Mashable since 2017.
