Steam Sales Start on Thursdays and Mondays: 70% of Discounts Begin on Two Days
Every recorded sale start sorted by weekday: Thursday 39%, Monday 31%, the weekend under 6%. Why Valve owns Thursday and publishers own Monday, and the two-day checking routine that covers almost everything.
Quick take
Seven in ten Steam discounts begin on a Thursday or a Monday. Weekends are nearly silent: Saturday and Sunday together start fewer than six percent of sales. If you check prices twice a week, those are the two days to do it — and a weekend price that has not moved by Monday evening is probably the price for the week.
Article details
- Author
- Matt Vieten
- Published
- October 10, 2026
- Read time
- 7 min
By Matt Vieten
In this article
- Thursday starts 39% of all recorded sales; Monday starts 31%.
- Saturday and Sunday combined start under 6%.
- The pattern holds for deep discounts too: 50%+ cuts follow the same two-day rhythm.
Steam runs on a weekly clock that most buyers feel without ever measuring. The seasonal sales open on a Thursday. The weekend deals open on a Thursday. The midweek specials and most publisher-run sales open on a Monday. I wanted to know how much of the year's discounting those two days actually carry, so I took every sale start in the ATLGames price history and sorted it by the day of the week it began on.
The answer is more lopsided than I expected. Across 284,513 recorded sale starts on Steam US, two days account for just over seventy percent of them, and the two weekend days barely register.
Sale starts by day of the week
| Day a sale began | Sale starts | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday | 111,585 | 39.2% |
| Monday | 87,977 | 30.9% |
| Wednesday | 28,651 | 10.1% |
| Tuesday | 22,405 | 7.9% |
| Friday | 17,109 | 6.0% |
| Saturday | 9,217 | 3.2% |
| Sunday | 7,569 | 2.7% |
Days are measured in UTC, which is the clock Steam's own 10 a.m. Pacific sale launches fall into, so a "Thursday" here is a Thursday on the Steam store. A sale is a contiguous period at a discounted price, counted once at its start; the data covers 8,479 games and runs from 2020 through early October 2026.
Why Thursday and Monday
Thursday is Valve's day. The four seasonal sales (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) all open on a Thursday, as do the themed fests and the weekend deals that run Thursday to Monday. Because the seasonal sales alone account for nearly half of all discounts in a year, Thursday was always going to lead.
Monday is the publishers' day. Midweek deals, publisher weeks and the sales that studios run on their own schedule overwhelmingly start on a Monday, presumably because that is when someone is at a desk to press the button. Monday's 31% share is almost entirely sales that are not part of a Valve event, which makes it the better day to look for discounts on games that sit out the seasonal sales.
Wednesday is a distant third, and Tuesday is mostly spillover: a sale scheduled for Monday in one time zone lands on Tuesday in UTC. Friday is small because anything meant to catch the weekend already started on Thursday.
The weekend is where sales end, not where they start
Saturday and Sunday together begin fewer than one sale in seventeen. That does not mean nothing is on sale at the weekend, obviously; the weekend deals and the seasonal sales are all live then. It means that a price you see on Saturday is almost never a new price. It started on Thursday, and if you missed Thursday's batch there is nothing new coming until Monday.
For a buyer this removes a lot of pointless checking. There is no reason to refresh a wishlist on a Sunday afternoon hoping something changed. The two moments that matter are Thursday after 10 a.m. Pacific and Monday after the same time.
Deep discounts keep the same rhythm
I wondered whether the big cuts followed a different pattern, with Valve's events skewing deeper than publisher weeks or vice versa. They do not. Restricting the count to sales of 50% off or more produces almost the same split: Thursday 41%, Monday 30%, weekends under 6%. Depth is set by the publisher and the game; timing is set by the calendar.
A two-day routine that covers almost everything
- Thursday evening: the weekend deals and any Valve event are live. This is when seasonal-sale floors appear, so check anything you are watching for an all-time-low badge.
- Monday evening: publisher sales and midweek deals have started. This is the better day for games that rarely join Valve's events.
- Any other day: the price you see is almost certainly the price until the next Thursday or Monday, so there is no urgency and no need to check.
Combine this with the six-week cadence most games follow, which I measured in How Often Do Steam Games Actually Go on Sale?, and the waiting game becomes very simple: roughly twelve Thursdays and Mondays per cycle, and a new price on one of them.
Method: the UTC weekday of the first discounted price point in every recorded sale across 8,479 tracked Steam games. The live deals page refreshes every few hours, so Thursday's and Monday's new prices are in by the evening.
About the author
Matt Vieten
Matt has been buying PC games on Steam since 2007 and has tracked seasonal sale patterns, bundle math, and price history obsessively for the last decade. He built ATLGames.io to put the same buying framework he uses personally in front of other budget-conscious players. Articles here reflect his own analysis of the data the site collects from IsThereAnyDeal and Steam, not paid editorial.