What's the best time of year to buy a TV? Yes, there's an answer.
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On any given day, poking around for TVs on sale is all but guaranteed to turn up at least some decent steals.
Of course, retailers don't casually offer their best TV prices year-round, and tariffs have made tech deals in general feel more scarce than usual this year. Though TVs weren't affected as overtly as the Nintendo Switch 2 or Xbox consoles, a majority of the best TV brands do their manufacturing in countries facing steep import rates.
Aside from Black Friday, NFL playoffs season, spring, and Amazon Prime Day are three other times that you'll find a lot of TVs on sale (and at lower-than-usual sale prices), including premium flagship models that don't get much action otherwise.
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It's easiest to think about the strategy as a cycle: Whichever of these big sale windows is coming up next will probably match, or even beat, most of the deals seen during whichever sale window came right before it. For instance, Prime Day 2025 just out-priced most of the best TV deals we saw during football season in February, but will probably be out-priced by Prime Day 2 in October and Black Friday.
At any rate, knowing when TVs are cheaper than usual is a good adult shopping skill to have. The selection of live TV deals fluctuates depending on the month, and understanding the peaks of the TV calendar is a crucial chapter in the unofficial TV buyer's guide. (If your search is a more straightforward "just tell me the best TV deals right now" vibe, check out Mashable's dedicated TV tab. If we find a noteworthy deal on a specific TV on any given day, it'll pop up here.)
The #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 throwing down in a Best Buy parking lot at the crack of dawn anymore, but Black Friday TV deals are still unmatched — they just don't require you to wake up at 2 a.m. anymore.
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 aren't trying to trick you — in fact, Best Buy and Samsung will straight-up tag a certain deal as a Black Friday deal if they drop it ahead of time, confirming to buyers that 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 top 65-inch TVs (or larger). You can save hundreds on high-end QLEDs, OLEDs, and big-screen cheap QLEDs at shockingly low prices. Budget-friendly TVs get even more. Walmart also stays in the mix with a handful of wild doorbuster deals on the best cheap TVs. Amazon mostly dabbles in the affordable TV crowd and focuses on its own Fire TVs, which often drop to record-low prices.
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 sale prices on TVs subtly go up by $100 or two (or three) during post-holiday sales. However, if you miss the Black Friday-Cyber Monday season, another chance to save soon follows...
The second-best time to find TV deals: NFL playoff season
Months: Mid-January to early February
The people want to know: Are TVs cheaper after the holidays? The answer is technically yes, but not in the "after-Christmas sales slash New Year's sales" way that you're thinking.
If you didn't snag your TV during Black Friday, your next best bet is to wait in the wings until the end of January for football-fueled deals, which 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).
The month-long lead-up to the biggest football game of the year — one of the most-watched sporting events of the year — is prime time to find a TV on sale. In particular, these deals may focus more on TVs that are good for watching sports: i.e., big-screen QLEDs. The vibrant lighting supplied by a QLED panel is ideal for following small details like a ball or tiny score box, as well as the brightness of the team's colors and the field to make 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 during Black Friday, or in some cases, drop even lower in price due to proximity to CES. (See explanation below.)
There is one group of TVs that still may not be seeing their lowest possible sale price during football sales: If you're eyeing one of the most premium, most recent models from a certain brand and still aren't seeing a discount of more than $100 or two, you might consider pumping the breaks until spring.
The third-best time to find TV deals: Spring
Months: March and April
Flagship TVs don't go on sale that often. And even when we get deals, the discounts hardly feel like a deal. (Oh, wow: $200 off a $2,000 TV? You shouldn't have.)
Until CES happens, that is. CES is a Las Vegas-based tech trade show where the latest and greatest consumer tech is unveiled to gadget enthusiasts. The annual TV release cycle mostly revolves around CES, as it's where brands like Samsung, LG, TCL, and Hisense show off their new TV designs for the year. While these fresh releases aren't the ones going on sale, those splashy new TV releases do force last year's models to go on sale.
The key here is that the best deals start not when the TVs are announced at the event in January, but once they're officially up for grabs to the public in the spring. As of May 2025, most highly-awaited flagship TVs for the year are out, or at least have prices announced. For example, LG released the OLED C5 OLED in March, TCL released the QM6K Mini LED in March, and Samsung released the Frame Pro and unveiled prices for its S95F OLED in April. Funny enough, we caught some small discounts on those new models in their first weeks on the market. But the real hack is to look for deals on the predecessors (like the LG C4 OLED or older Samsung Frame models) right after the new models drop.
The one outlier here is Sony, which has been sitting CES out for the past few years in favor of its own release schedule — a very Apple and iRobot-coded tactic. In 2023 and 2025, Sony announced its new TV lines for the year in March, though it deviated in 2024 with a June launch. Sony's slightly differing release calendar doesn't change the fact that Black Friday and football season are the main times for discounts. Then, Sony's discounts throughout the year will simply depend on when its annual TV lineup launches. Its 2025 Bravia 8 II OLED and Bravia 5 and 2 LCD models should be revealed any day now.
Honorable mention: Prime Day
Month: July
Amazon was historically pretty low on the list of best places to buy a TV. While it does sell most of the same brands of TVs as competing retailers do, its sale prices are more volatile and often plagued by inflated prices that make discounts look better than they are. (Pro tip: You can spot-check the prices of TVs at Amazon by pasting the listing URL into Camelcamelcamel, a free Amazon price tracking site.)
However, 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). Naturally, Fire TVs are the focal point during Prime events, and these deals go hard. For example, we've seen a 43-inch Amazon Omni 4K Fire TV drop to $99.99 during Prime Big Deal Days. The week before Prime Day 2025, a 65-inch Insignia QLED Fire TV dropped to $329.99, and an 85-inch Panasonic OLED Fire TV dropped to $997.99. These are wild screen size to price ratios that can only be rivaled by similar Walmart doorbusters on its TV brand, onn.
Past that, Amazon really upped its game on non-Fire TVs on sale during Prime Day 2025. The selection of cheap QLED TVs was massive, but more surprisingly, so was the selection of record-low prices on 2025 flagship TVs. That's usually Best Buy's forte. The timing for that makes sense: Prime Day is the first big sale event that strikes after the year's new TVs have had a few months on the market. Many were far too fresh to go on sale in the spring, but July? That's the sweet spot.
But Amazon isn't the only good place to buy a TV on sale during Prime Day. Amazon's self-titled events also trigger conveniently-timed competing sales from its biggest competitors, and as antithetical as it sounds, Best Buy and Walmart almost always beat Amazon at its own game during Prime Day — with TVs, at least. Unless Fire TV is already your comfort streaming platform, don't limit your TV search to Amazon during these events just because Amazon picked the dates.
Topics Amazon Black Friday Prime Day
Frequently Asked Questions
You can take your old TV to a Best Buy store to recycle. Best Buy 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 and TVs, plus eco-friendly hacks. Her ever-evolving experience in these categories comes in clutch when making recommendations on how to spend your money during shopping holidays like Black Friday, which Leah has been covering for Mashable since 2017.
