When Is the Best Time to Buy a TV?

The month-by-month pattern

TV pricing follows one of the more well-documented seasonal calendars in consumer electronics, and multiple independent sources agree on the broad shape of it. Consumer Reports has found that November delivers the biggest TV discounts of the year, with the true best prices often landing in the week before Thanksgiving rather than on Black Friday itself — Cyber Monday extends that window a few days further. Consumer Reports also reports that Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers can realistically save 25% to 50% or more compared to regular pricing, though the exact percentage varies a lot by model and retailer. NerdWallet and Consumer Reports both point to a clear second-place window: the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl in late January and into February, when retailers run sales timed to the game and sizes marketed for "watch parties" get discounted especially hard. Presidents Day, in mid-February, tends to extend that second window a little further before pricing normalizes into spring.

CES and the model-year changeover

Every major TV brand — LG, Samsung, Sony, TCL, Hisense — unveils its new annual lineup at CES in early January, but those new sets typically do not reach store shelves until March. That gap matters for buyers: retailers don't wait for the new models to arrive before discounting the outgoing ones. Once CES announcements make a model officially "last year's," clearance pricing on it can start almost immediately, which is part of why January and February already line up with genuinely good deals rather than just holdover Black Friday stock. The flip side is that once the new lineup is actually in stores — generally by April — inventory of the previous generation dries up and prices stabilize until the next scheduled sale event, so the clearance window has a practical shelf life of a few months, not the whole spring.

OLED vs. QLED: different price-drop timing

The two dominant premium TV technologies don't discount on quite the same schedule. What Hi-Fi's price-history analysis of an LG OLED model found that a flagship OLED set that launched at full price saw its steepest markdown not on Black Friday but three to four months after release, once the following year's replacement was already looming — in that case, close to a 50% cut within about a month of the discount starting. That's a useful reminder that "newest OLED flagship" and "best OLED discount" are rarely the same TV at the same time; the deepest OLED savings tend to land on the model that's about to be superseded, not the just-launched one. QLED and Mini-LED sets, which use different backlighting rather than self-lit pixels, generally carry a lower starting price than comparable OLEDs to begin with, so their Black Friday and Super Bowl discounts stack on top of an already cheaper baseline rather than needing the same multi-month wait to hit their best price.

Screen-size and the value sweet spot

Size shopping guides that track TV pricing consistently point to the jump from 55 inches to 65 inches as the single best value upgrade available, since it adds roughly 40% more screen area for a comparatively modest price increase — more area per dollar than the next step up to 75 inches typically delivers. If your budget is capped, buying guides also generally advise that a 55-inch set can get you a meaningfully better panel (OLED or Mini-LED) for the same money than stretching that budget to a lower-tier 65-inch TV. None of this changes the seasonal calendar above — a 65-inch set still discounts hardest around Black Friday and the Super Bowl — but it's worth deciding on size and panel tier before shopping a sale, since "biggest size for the money" and "best picture quality for the money" can point to different TVs at the same price.

Prime Day and other mid-year sales

Amazon Prime Day in July is a real secondary event for TV buyers, not just a laptop-and-gadgets sale. MacRumors' Prime Day coverage has specifically flagged TV deals hitting the lowest prices of the year for a number of models, and TechRadar's ongoing Prime Day tracking each year shows steep cuts across budget and mid-range sets from Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart running concurrently. It's a particularly good window for TVs in the affordable-to-mid-range bracket rather than for the newest flagships, which are usually still near full price in July.

Back-to-school season is not a TV event

Unlike laptops, which get a dedicated late-August discount push tied to the school year, TVs generally don't have their own back-to-school sales event. Retailers' August and early-September promotions in this window are built around laptops, tablets, and dorm gear; TV pricing in this stretch tends to just sit at its post-Prime-Day, pre-Black-Friday baseline rather than seeing a dedicated markdown of its own. If you're shopping in late summer specifically for a TV rather than a laptop, there's no particular reason to expect a discount tied to the calendar — the next real event is Black Friday.

Refurbished and open-box TVs

Open-box and manufacturer-refurbished TVs can be genuine bargains, but the two aren't the same thing and buying guides from outlets like Tom's Guide and Dealnews draw a clear line between them. An open-box TV has typically been returned to the retailer and only inspected by that retailer, with a warranty that's often limited to defects and sometimes as short as 30 days. A manufacturer-refurbished set has usually been repaired and tested by the original brand and can carry warranty coverage closer to a full year. Reasonable places to shop either category include Best Buy's own outlet listings and Amazon Warehouse, both of which post standard return windows. A widely repeated rule of thumb in this space is that if the discount versus a new unit is under roughly $100, the reduced warranty and unknown history usually aren't worth trading away.

Extended warranties are usually a poor trade

Consumer Reports has been consistent on this point for years: it advises consumers to decline extended warranties on electronics, TVs included. Its research found the median price of an electronics service plan came out to around $136, while the average repair cost was barely $20 more than that — meaning most buyers who purchase a plan are paying for protection against a repair bill that, on average, would have cost only slightly more than the plan itself. Consumer Reports does allow for a narrow exception on genuinely expensive, repair-costly technology like large flat-panel TVs, but even there its guidance caps a reasonable warranty price at no more than about 20% of what you paid for the TV. If a salesperson's add-on quote is anywhere near the price of the set itself, that's a signal to walk away from the warranty, not necessarily the TV.

How much to trust this pattern

The core calendar here — November for the single deepest cuts, January through February as a strong secondary window, and a quieter Prime Day bump in July — is corroborated independently by Consumer Reports, NerdWallet, and several tech outlets that track pricing year over year, which is about as much agreement as this kind of seasonal claim gets. Where the sourcing gets thinner is on precise numbers: specific "40% off" or "save $500" figures attached to particular models are almost always retailer or brand marketing copy rather than independently verified before-and-after pricing, and the same nominal discount can mean very different things depending on whether the "regular price" being discounted from was ever a price the TV actually sold at for a meaningful stretch of time. The CES-to-clearance mechanism and the OLED multi-month-lag pattern are logically consistent with how the industry releases hardware, but were verified here through general retail and price-history reporting rather than a single authoritative dataset, so treat the exact timing (a given week in January versus February, for instance) as a reasonable window rather than a fixed date.

Related guides

If you're furnishing a home office or media room around the same Black Friday weekend, it's worth checking our guide to the best time to buy a laptop, since laptop and TV discounts often peak on the same November weekend and during the same back-to-school stretch, even though — as noted above — TVs and laptops don't share the same August sales calendar.