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Columbus Day 2026 falls on Monday, October 12, and the discounts around it run from roughly the Thursday before to the Tuesday after. Two things are worth knowing before you shop it. Most large retailers don’t use the name any more, so searching for it by the holiday will miss a lot. And Black Friday follows 46 days later, on Friday, November 27. Whether those 46 days are worth waiting out depends entirely on what you’re buying, and last year’s prices split sharply by category.
The holiday has been leaving retail quietly for years. Dillard’s dropped its Columbus Day promotion in 2009 and Macy’s ended its own in 2017. Belk kept the sale but renamed it the Feeling Fall Sale. Rooms To Go went the other way and kept the name deliberately, on the grounds that it’s the federal name for the holiday.
So the mid-October discount window is real, but it isn’t reliably called Columbus Day any more and it isn’t centered on the Monday. The larger October event belongs to Amazon, which ran its fall sale on October 7 and 8 last year and hasn’t announced this year’s dates.
What follows is a directory of 186 retailers, each linking straight to what it has discounted right now. Every sale page was opened and checked. The ones that turned out to be dead, or quietly redirecting somewhere else, were dropped rather than listed.
Find Your Store
186 retailers, each linking straight to what it has discounted right now.
What Counts as a Good October Deal
Half the numbers on a sale page are anchored to something other than what the product normally sells for. These are the checks worth running before you decide the October price is the good one.
- Compare it to last Black Friday, not to the list price. Plenty of the retailers below sit at the same price in October as they reach in November. If a price matches what the product hit on Black Friday, that’s a real floor rather than a countdown clock.
- Find out whose price got crossed out. Most brands strike through their own former price. Some strike through what they say comparable products cost elsewhere, which is a competitor comparison and not a price the item ever sold at. The left-hand number is the one that means anything.
- Check whether the model is being replaced. The deepest cut we tracked, the AirPods Pro 2 at $139, happened because a newer model had launched and the old stock was clearing. That’s the discount worth waiting for, and it doesn’t follow the calendar.
- Watch for a discount that never leaves. If a brand has run the same promotion all year, the sale isn’t an event and there’s no reason to rush. There’s also no penalty for buying whenever suits you.
- Read the return terms before the price. A trial period that costs a pickup fee, a restocking charge, or a final-sale tag on clearance stock can all cost more than the discount saved you.
Mattresses, Where October Held Its Own
The mattress brands in the directory don’t agree with each other, and the difference decides whether waiting helps.
Nectar’s Classic queen was $649 in late October and $649 on Black Friday. DreamCloud’s Classic Hybrid was $699 both times, with the same bundle attached on both dates. That isn’t a coincidence. Both brands run a promotion more or less continuously, so what looks like a sale price is close to the everyday price, and the crossed-out number beside it is doing most of the persuading.
The practical upshot is that there’s no urgency on these two, and no penalty for buying whenever suits you. It also means the countdown timer on the page isn’t telling you anything.
Helix is the opposite case and worth the comparison. Its Midnight Luxe queen went from $1,919 in late October to $1,751 on Black Friday, a $168 difference, because Helix holds its discounts shallower through the year and therefore has room to cut. So the honest answer on mattresses isn’t a category answer at all. It depends which brand you’re looking at.
One more thing worth saying plainly: Columbus Day isn’t a mattress event on anyone’s calendar except the sites that earn a commission on it. Sleep Doctor’s mattress sale calendar lists nine holidays and doesn’t include it. Sleep Foundation’s guide to timing a mattress purchase never mentions it. The mid-October window is real, but the holiday isn’t what makes it happen.
TVs and Home Theater
The category where the answer splits hardest between one model and the next.
Samsung’s 65-inch S90F was $1,598 in October and $1,398 on Black Friday, so waiting saved $200. But Hisense’s 65-inch U8QG was $998 in October and $997.99 on Black Friday, a one cent difference, and TCL’s 65-inch QM7K moved by about a dollar. Screen size matters more than the brand here, and an October price on a 55-inch tells you nothing about the 65-inch in November.
Headphones and Earbuds
One of the few categories where an October price held all the way through November.
Bose’s QuietComfort Ultra headphones were $299 in October and $299 on Black Friday, both times against a $429 list. Sony’s WH-1000XM6 moved $30 across the same stretch. The AirPods Pro 2 was the biggest mover of everything we tracked, and that had nothing to do with the season: a newer model had arrived and the old stock was being cleared.
Kitchen and Small Appliances
The most mixed category of the lot, and the only one where October won outright.
The Ninja Creami was $180 at both events. The Le Creuset 5.5 qt round was $290 in October against $295.29 on Black Friday, the single case we found where October came out ahead, though by an amount too small to plan around. The Vitamix 5200 went the other way and dropped $50 between the two dates.
Where Else to Shop This Month
Four retailers worth checking against whatever the feed is showing.
How to Time an October Purchase
Start by asking whether the model is about to be replaced. The deepest discount we tracked came from a product being cleared, not from a holiday. If a successor has just launched, the outgoing model will keep falling regardless of the date.
Check whether the brand discounts all year. If it does, as Nectar and DreamCloud do, the October price is the price and waiting achieves nothing. If it holds firm most of the year, as Helix does, it has room to cut and November is likely to be lower.
Match the exact model and size before you compare anything. The most common way to fool yourself is to compare an October price on one screen size against a November price on another. Two of the TVs we looked at moved by a dollar; a third moved by $200.
Ask what the return actually costs. A 365 night trial that charges a pickup fee, a bundle that becomes final sale, or a restocking charge can each undo the discount. This matters most on the big-ticket items where the saving looks largest.
If you need it now, buy it now. Nothing in the data supports sleeping on a broken mattress or an unusable laptop for 46 days to save $50. The list above exists so you can tell which purchases are worth deferring, not to argue that every one of them is.
Columbus Day Sale FAQ
The Bottom Line
Columbus Day is a real weekend to shop and a poor thing to search for, because most of the retailers running the sale stopped calling it that years ago. What matters more than the date is which of two patterns the product follows. Some brands discount continuously, and for those the October price is simply the price, so waiting 46 days achieves nothing. Others hold firm all year and cut hard once, and those are the ones worth deferring. Last year several of the products we tracked cost exactly the same in mid-October as they did on Black Friday, and one was cheaper in October. Check which pattern yours is in before you decide to wait.
