November 28 was Black Friday in 2025 and will be again in 2031 — but in 2026 Black Friday falls on November 27. Every year, it is Albania's Independence Day.
Next: Saturday, November 28, 2026.
Only in some years. Black Friday is the day after U.S. Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday of November), so it moves between November 23 and 29. It fell on November 28 in 2025 and will again in 2031 and 2036. In 2026 Black Friday is Friday, November 27, followed by Cyber Monday on November 30; in 2027 it is November 26. On November 28, 2026, a Saturday, the post-Thanksgiving shopping weekend will be under way.
The earliest known uses of "Black Friday" for the day after Thanksgiving date from the early 1950s, and by the late 1950s and early 1960s Philadelphia police were using it to describe the crowds and traffic jams that came with the start of the holiday shopping season. Philadelphia merchants disliked the name, and a 1961 attempt to rebrand it "Big Friday" did not stick. The popular explanation that it is the day stores go from "red ink" to "black ink" profits is a later reinterpretation: it appeared in print in the early 1980s, including in The Philadelphia Inquirer on November 28, 1981, as retailers looked for a positive spin on the term.
November 28 is Independence Day (Flag Day) in Albania. On this date in 1912, during the First Balkan War, an assembly led by Ismail Qemali in the port city of Vlorë declared Albania's independence from the Ottoman Empire and raised the national flag. Mauritania also celebrates its independence on November 28, gained from France in 1960.
Ferdinand Magellan's expedition completed the first passage through the strait at the tip of South America that now bears his name, after 38 days of navigating it. Magellan named the calm waters beyond the "Mar Pacífico" (peaceful sea). The voyage went on to complete the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1522, though Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines in 1521.
After a lecture by Christopher Wren at Gresham College in London, twelve men, including Wren and Robert Boyle, agreed to form a society to promote experimental learning. It received a royal charter from King Charles II in 1662 as the Royal Society, which is the oldest continuously existing scientific academy in the world.
Women voted in a national election in New Zealand for the first time. The Electoral Act, signed into law on September 19, 1893, had made New Zealand the first self-governing country to grant women the right to vote in parliamentary elections. The campaign was led by suffragists including Kate Sheppard.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met together for the first time at the Tehran Conference in Iran. Over four days the Allied leaders agreed on the plan to open a second front in Western Europe in 1944, the operation that became the D-Day landings in Normandy.