Black Friday 2026 officially lands on Friday, November 27 [1], but the selling season around it has already opened. As of November 11, the verifiable picture runs on two tracks. The PC track is live and priced: Steam's own US storefront data shows a Daily Deal cutting Project Winter 80 percent, from $9.99 to $1.99 USD [2]. The console track has started in the UK, where the new slim PS5 Digital sits at £289 under a Black Friday headline [3] — and no US Black Friday discount from Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo is on the record yet. The move for a US buyer follows from those facts: act this week on the PC discounts that fit your list, and check the official PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo store pages into the week of November 27 before paying for hardware.

The calendar explains why early November counts. Black Friday UK puts the official 2026 sale date at Friday, November 27, and describes what stores call "Black November": Boots, Smyths Toys and Currys have become known for month-long promotions, although most retailers start no more than one or two weeks early [1]. After Cyber Monday, "the Black Friday sales pretty much end" [1]. November 11 therefore sits inside the active season in the UK market, and the US PC storefront is already discounting [2] — which is why the buy-now-or-wait question has a checkable answer today.

The timing signals disagree

PC Gamer's 2026 graphics card deals page calls Black Friday "the biggest sales event of the year" while placing it "just around the corner" — not yet started [4]. Eurogamer's UK deals desk, by contrast, was already posting Black Friday-labeled prices on November 11 [3]. PC Gamer's own Black Friday coverage hub is live alongside both [5], and the US retail side is staged too: BlackFriday.com has opened its 2026 operation with Cyber Monday pages for GameStop, Microsoft Store and Lenovo [6]. The disagreement is the useful part. There is no single start gun for this event, so what counts as live depends on the market and the outlet doing the checking.

What you can buy today, with receipts

Concrete, priced discounts exist right now on the PC side, taken directly from Steam's US storefront data on November 11 [2]:

  • Project Winter — $9.99 down to $1.99 USD, 80% off, in the Daily Deal slot; the captured data shows no end time, so it can rotate out any day [2]
  • iRacing — $11.59 down to $4.63 USD, 60% off, expiring November 16 [2]
  • Warhammer Survivors — $7.99 down to $7.19 USD, 10% off, expiring November 17 [2]

Read the conditions as part of the price. Every amount is in USD on the US storefront, and the two expiry dates come from Steam's own discount data — these are rolling daily and midweek promotions, not a named seasonal sale. The listed price is what you pay, before any applicable sales tax at checkout. If a title on your list is among them, the expiry date is the deadline; November 27 is not.

The UK record extends past consoles into PC hardware. Eurogamer's deals desk lists Logitech's G305 Lightspeed mouse at £20, 67% off, and Asus's ROG Loki 850W power supply at 30% off, both under Black Friday labels [3]. Add the £289 PS5 Digital and the £43 DualSense in Midnight Black [3], and every concrete Black Friday hardware price on the record as of November 11 is a UK price in GBP. Those amounts show the season's console and peripheral discounts have started somewhere, and they set the benchmark a US offer has to be judged against.

Consoles: the US record and the UK benchmark

For Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, the US-facing record on November 11 is plain. The official sales channels are live: Sony's PS5 page lists the standard and Digital Edition consoles with a buy link to direct.playstation.com [7], Microsoft's Xbox Series X page is up [8], and Nintendo's US store is running [9]. As of November 11, none of the three has a US Black Friday discount on the record; the concrete console prices cited here are all UK prices [3]. Those store pages, plus the retailer hubs on BlackFriday.com [6] and PC Gamer's Black Friday hub [5], are the checklist for catching a US price when it appears — and the UK amounts above are what to judge it against.

Sony states on its PS5 page that from January 2028, newly released games will be sold for PlayStation in digital format only, while discs for games released before then continue to work [7]. That puts the cutoff roughly 14 months from this article's November 11, 2026 date, and it changes what a disc-drive model is worth at Black Friday pricing: the drive buys access to the existing physical catalog, not to games released from 2028 onward. Between a Digital Edition and a disc bundle at different prices, the total-cost comparison includes that cutoff.

The two dates that decide it

The season runs on two dates. November 16 and 17 are the expiry dates Steam's own data attaches to the iRacing and Warhammer Survivors discounts [2] — for those two titles, the deadline arrives before Black Friday does. November 27 is the official Black Friday date [1], the anchor the console decision runs against until a verified US price appears earlier on the brand pages [7] [8] [9]. November 16–17 for the two Steam prices that expire; November 27 for the console hardware.