The months when discounts run deepest, and why it matters less than you think
There is a widely held belief that the discount calendar has peaks and troughs so pronounced that timing a purchase is most of the game. We checked it against 24,130 deals from our own history.
The pattern is real. It is also much flatter than the belief suggests.
Average discount by month
| Month | Average discount | Median discount |
|---|---|---|
| October | 43.8% | 43.6% |
| December | 43.7% | 43.8% |
| June | 43.5% | 43.0% |
| November | 43.0% | 43.4% |
| January | 42.2% | 42.0% |
| September | 41.6% | 40.2% |
| February | 41.5% | 40.0% |
| July | 40.7% | 38.3% |
| August | 40.5% | 40.0% |
| March | 40.2% | 39.9% |
| April | 40.1% | 39.1% |
| May | 39.8% | 38.9% |
Four points, end to end
The whole year fits between 39.8% and 43.8%. On a $200 purchase that is the difference between saving $80 and saving $88. It is real money and it is worth having, but it is not the difference between a bargain and a rip-off, and it is nothing like the swing the shopping calendar implies.
The months that come out on top are roughly where you would expect: October and November running into the November sales, December for Christmas, and June for end of financial year. May is the flattest month in our data.
Why the category matters more than the month
Put the two together and the point becomes obvious. The gap between the best and worst month is about 4 points. The gap between the best and worst category is more than 36 points, from 58.5% on home improvement down to 22.3% on kids and baby goods.
Waiting five months to buy a laptop moves your expected discount by a couple of points. What you are buying, and whether the particular deal in front of you is good for its category, matters roughly nine times as much as when you buy it. We wrote about those category baselines here.
What we are not claiming
This is a genuine limit worth stating. We know how deep the discounts we recorded were, month by month. We do not know how often Australian retailers discounted, because our own monthly deal counts reflect how much we were scraping at the time rather than what the market was doing. So the depth figures above are the ones we will stand behind, and we have deliberately left the frequency question alone.
Figures come from an analysis of our own deal history: 24,130 deals posted between 2021 and 2026, of which 72.3% carried a price and an earlier price we could compare. The analysis was last run on 13 August 2026.