What to Expect for Amazon Prime Day 2025

Amazon Prime Day started in 2015 and has become an annual summer sale. Prime Day usually takes place in mid-July and lasts for two days, but this year, likely in response to consumer concerns about inflation and tariffs causing price hikes, the sale will be four days long. In 2022, Amazon added a second sale in October to kick off the holiday shopping season. And in 2024, it introduced a third sitewide sale: the Big Spring Sale, the first that didn’t require a Prime membership, but Amazon did not run that sale again in 2025.

Amazon often promotes early deals, discounts, and other promotions in the days leading up to its big events, and this year is no different. There are already offers on Amazon’s own lineup of devices, like Echo smart speakers, Fire tablets, Fire TVs, and Kindle e-readers, as well as its smart home brand Ring and its WiFi router brand Eero. These discounts tend to remain steady through the sale itself.

There are also typically early deals on products from other popular brands, though these have not become available just yet. They typically start to emerge in the week or two leading up to the sale, so we will be keeping a watchful eye on prices to bring you the latest updates.

We also often see special offers for first-time Prime subscribers to Amazon’s services, such as Prime Video, Amazon Music, and Kindle Unlimited. Consumer Reports will monitor all of Amazon’s sale offerings to bring you the latest deals, so bookmark our Deals Hub and check back often.

Prime Day typically brings price drops on popular items like headphones, robotic vacuums, smartwatches, and mattresses, as well as apparel, household goods, back-to-school supplies, electronics, toys, and more. For these big sales, Amazon touts hundreds of thousands of deals, including discounts on popular seasonal and gift items.

With all Amazon sale events, not all discounts are guaranteed to be available for the duration of the sale. This year, because the sale is four days long, Amazon is introducing a new feature called "Today’s Big Deals." Each day, new themed deals will emerge at midnight Pacific time on name brands such as Samsung and Levi’s. Amazon claims the deals will only be available for a limited time and in limited quantities.

There may also be Lightning Deals throughout the sale, which have countdown clocks, encouraging shoppers to buy quickly rather than miss them, though this year, they may be labeled differently to look more like Today’s Big Deals, so we’ll let you know. Other sales may end without warning if items go out of stock. For more on how to get the best deals, check out our tips.

Consumer Reports’ product experts will be tracking all the deals and sharing the best offers on top-tested products.

Since Amazon’s first sitewide event, there have been big sales at other major stores coinciding with Prime Day. Many retailers refer to this as Black Friday in July, while others may just keep things simple and refer to their events as summer sales. But no matter what name they use, their prices tend to rival Amazon’s, which means you can shop at your preferred store and still get the same or similar pricing on many of the items.

Consumer Reports will be keeping an eye on all of these retailers and more to help you find the best prices on quality products.

If you’re not already a Prime member, you’ll need to sign up to access this sale. (Check the Amazon policy on free trial memberships.) You can add items to a shopping list or even to your cart (you can always move them to “saved for later”) so that you can quickly access them during the sale to see whether they’re available at a discount.

Consumer Reports will track all the deals available before, during, and after Prime Day. We’ll compare prices on CR-tested products with each product’s typical cost and watch the prices at other retailers to help you avoid overspending or buying something that doesn’t work well. You can also take a look at CR’s Deals hub for the latest and best deals from Amazon and other major retailers leading up to and during the big sale event.