This live data study tracks whether a promo code still applies at checkout when Black Friday arrives, measured from SimplyCodes' real checkout attempts week after week and set against what shoppers actually did over the most recent Black Friday weekend on record. It is rebuilt daily as new weeks of checkout testing land.
SimplyCodes, the code verification service, tested 21,092,782 promo-code applications at checkout across 23 straight weeks: 81.9% succeeded, and no single week fell outside 80.5%–84.1%. Over Black Friday weekend, shoppers copied 1.00 times their normal daily volume of codes while discount depth held at 27.6%, against a 27.6% baseline.
- The event moves demand, not outcomes: code copying ran 1.00× its normal daily volume over the weekend, while the share of copied codes worth 25% or more moved 0.0 points.
- Checkout success stayed inside a 3.6-point band for 23 consecutive weeks — the odds a code works do not have a season.
- Black Friday is a volume event for promo codes rather than a depth event: more shoppers reach for a code, and the codes they reach for are the ones already on offer.
Checkout success = the share of SimplyCodes' promo-code applications at checkout that succeeded that week · Attempts = how many applications that week rests on. A week is reported only when it carries at least 250,000 attempts, which is what keeps a partial week out of the series.
| # | Week | Checkout success | Attempts |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Week of Feb 23, 2026 | 82.0% | 909,658 |
| 2 | Week of Mar 2, 2026 | 82.3% | 1,036,182 |
| 3 | Week of Mar 9, 2026 | 81.1% | 952,339 |
| 4 | Week of Mar 16, 2026 | 81.9% | 1,116,905 |
| 5 | Week of Mar 23, 2026 | 81.2% | 1,077,589 |
| 6 | Week of Mar 30, 2026 | 81.4% | 980,027 |
| 7 | Week of Apr 6, 2026 | 81.4% | 908,115 |
| 8 | Week of Apr 13, 2026 | 81.5% | 1,009,913 |
| 9 | Week of Apr 20, 2026 | 81.7% | 989,724 |
| 10 | Week of Apr 27, 2026 | 82.7% | 554,091 |
| 11 | Week of May 4, 2026 | 81.5% | 974,561 |
| 12 | Week of May 11, 2026 | 82.8% | 1,112,898 |
| 13 | Week of May 18, 2026 | 80.9% | 1,067,281 |
| 14 | Week of May 25, 2026 | 81.9% | 1,010,917 |
| 15 | Week of Jun 1, 2026 | 84.1% | 566,032 |
| 16 | Week of Jun 8, 2026 | 82.2% | 941,265 |
| 17 | Week of Jun 15, 2026 | 82.2% | 946,594 |
| 18 | Week of Jun 22, 2026 | 81.8% | 872,715 |
| 19 | Week of Jun 29, 2026 | 80.5% | 934,512 |
| 20 | Week of Jul 6, 2026 | 81.9% | 864,440 |
| 21 | Week of Jul 13, 2026 | 82.5% | 988,415 |
| 22 | Week of Jul 20, 2026 | 82.9% | 714,371 |
| 23 | Week of Jul 27, 2026 | 82.5% | 564,238 |
23 complete weeks of real checkout attempts · an all-store measurement, no individual store named or graded · the Black Friday comparison rests on one event cycle, because continuous daily records begin in January 2025 · checked August 13, 2026 · numbers last changed Aug 13, 2026. Refreshed daily.
Methodology
How SimplyCodes verifies codes. Behind every figure in this live data study is the SimplyCodes verification system. Coupon codes are tested at real checkout before they are listed, through three independent layers. Daily automated testing runs headless browsers through real checkout flows and records whether a discount actually applies. A human verification network of 10,000+ verifiers submits screenshot-and-timestamp proof, at 4.6M+ verification actions a month and 98% accuracy. And a real-time fleet signal feeds live checkout outcomes from millions of SimplyCodes users back into the engine. Each code carries a Health Score from 0–100, weighted by checkout outcomes, verifier consensus, and recency. With an estimated 40–60% of coupon codes on the public web dead, restricted, or fake, the system exists so a code earns its place by working at checkout, not by being collected.
How this study is built. We count every promo code SimplyCodes applied at a real checkout, group the attempts into complete weeks, and report the share that succeeded. A week enters the series only when it carries at least 250,000 attempts, so a partial week at either end cannot read as a sudden swing. Alongside it we measure what shoppers actually did over Black Friday weekend against the 30 days before it: how many codes were copied per day, and what share of those codes were worth 25% or more off. Only codes whose stated value is a percentage enter that depth calculation, bounded between 1% and 95% to drop placeholder entries. The Black Friday comparison rests on a single event cycle — continuous daily records begin in January 2025 — and this live data study makes no multi-year claim. Every figure is an all-store measurement, never a grade on an individual store. Figures refresh with the data snapshot shown above.
Cite this data
Across 23 consecutive weeks and 21,092,782 real checkout attempts, 81.9% of promo-code applications tested by SimplyCodes succeeded, with no week outside 80.5%–84.1%.
According to SimplyCodes verification data (Black Friday code reliability tracker, August 13, 2026), Black Friday weekend lifted promo-code copying to 1.00 times a normal day while discount depth moved 0.0 points and checkout success held at 81.9%.
More from this live data study
The rate does not move
Between February 23 and July 27, 2026, SimplyCodes recorded 21,092,782 code applications at checkout across 23 consecutive weeks. 81.9% of them succeeded.
The average holds almost steady week to week. The weekly success rate never left a band running from 80.5% to 84.1%. That is a 3.6-point spread across five months and more than twenty million attempts. No week in that window, holiday or ordinary, pushed it out. That rate counts only the applications that came back with a definite verdict, and because checkout testing begins in February 2026, the band above has not yet been through a Black Friday of its own — the next one gets measured here as it happens.
That stability answers the Black Friday question. A code either applies at checkout or it does not, and the machinery deciding that (a retailer's promotion rules, an expiry date, an exclusion list) does not know what day it is.
What Black Friday changes
Over the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday 2025, shoppers copied 342,882 codes a day. Over the preceding 30 days they copied 156,278 a day, which makes the weekend 2.19 times the normal rate.
Black Friday itself, November 28, 2025, ran hotter still: 463,966 codes copied in a single day, close to three times a normal November day, spread across 10,020 different retailers. Cyber Monday, December 1, came in at 396,580.
So the weekend is real, and it is enormous. The spike is in demand.
The discounts do not get deeper
Sale coverage rarely looks at how deep those codes go. Counting every copied code with a stated percentage off, 27.0% of the codes shoppers took over Black Friday weekend 2025 were 25% off or deeper, measured on 1,085,949 codes. Over the preceding 30 days, the figure was 27.6%, measured on 2,810,774 codes.
Black Friday weekend was six-tenths of a point shallower than an ordinary late-autumn day.
A promo code is not where a Black Friday discount lives. The headline cut is a marked-down price, applied to the item before you ever reach the cart. The code you add on top is doing the same modest job in November it does in June.
Shoppers pulled heavily from apparel and outdoor brands over the weekend — Fashion Nova, SKIMS and Carhartt were among the retailers seeing the most code activity — but the pattern held everywhere: more codes, not better ones.
What to do with this
Use a code on Black Friday. Roughly four in five apply cleanly, and that has been true every week we have measured.
Do not wait for Black Friday to get a deeper code, because the depth is not seasonal. If a store is running 30% off in October, that is the same class of offer it will run in November, and the November version has to compete with far more shoppers reaching for it.
