Dick's Sporting Goods Clearance Schedule: The Day Markdowns Actually Drop (Measured)
Most “Dick’s clearance schedule” articles list holiday sales: Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Black Friday. That is the promo calendar, and it tells you nothing about when a specific pair of cleats or a Yeti cooler gets its next markdown.
We track the price of every product in Dick’s Sporting Goods’ online catalog, roughly 128,000 items, and re-check them every two hours. Every time a price moves, we log it. This post is what 60 days of that log says about when Dick’s marks down, how the markdown ladder works, and how long a deep deal stays buyable.
Markdowns land on Friday. Not roughly. Overwhelmingly.
Between July 10 and September 6, 2026 we logged 69,824 price drops at Dick’s. Here is the day of the week each one appeared:
| Day | Price drops | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Friday | 42,511 | 61% |
| Thursday | 13,057 | 19% |
| Saturday | 6,285 | 9% |
| Monday | 4,780 | 7% |
| Tuesday | 1,450 | 2% |
| Wednesday | 1,198 | 2% |
| Sunday | 543 | 1% |
Friday plus the Thursday lead-in accounts for four out of five markdowns. Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday are close to dead.
One check before trusting a number like this: is it Dick’s behavior, or just when our scanner happens to run? Our scanner runs every two hours, every day, and we recorded price drops on all 59 days of the window. If the Friday spike were a scanning artifact, we would see nothing on the other days. We see a trickle. The concentration is Dick’s doing.
Filter to the drops that matter, the ones that took an item to 40% off or deeper, and the picture holds with one wrinkle:
| Day | Drops to 40%+ off | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Friday | 7,741 | 53% |
| Monday | 2,832 | 20% |
| Thursday | 1,728 | 12% |
| Saturday | 701 | 5% |
| Tuesday | 698 | 5% |
| Wednesday | 601 | 4% |
| Sunday | 196 | 1% |
Monday moves up for the deep cuts. Our reading: Friday is the broad markdown batch, and Monday is a cleanup pass on whatever the weekend did not sell.
What to do with this: check on Friday morning. If you only look once a week, Friday is the day. If you can look twice, add Monday.
The markdown ladder: 15% steps, Friday after Friday
Dick’s does not go from full price to 70% off in one move. It steps.
Over the last 90 days, 40,661 distinct products took at least one price drop. Of those:
- 16,593 dropped two or more times
- 9,555 dropped three or more times
- Items with three or more drops ended at an average of 51% off list
The median single step is a 15.4% cut from the previous price. So a $100 item typically goes $100, then about $85, then about $72, then about $61, and so on. The rungs are not evenly spaced in time. Most land in the Friday batch, and an item can take two steps in consecutive weeks or sit at one price for a month.
A concrete ladder from the log, a CALIA women’s legging listed at $88: $14.23, then $12.73, then $10.97, then $9.73, then $8.97. Five steps, each one a small cut, none of them large enough to make a headline. That is the normal shape of a Dick’s clearance item, and it is why a “last seen price” alone is not enough. You want to know how many rungs it has already descended.
Fan gear is the exception. Post-event team merchandise gets cut in one move. New England Patriots Super Bowl LX Bound gear went from $125 to $5.98 in a single drop. Season-ending merch, playoff shirts and championship-bound hats behave like this every year and are the fastest path to 90%+ off at Dick’s.
How deep does Dick’s clearance actually go?
Snapshot of the live catalog as of this week:
| Discount off list | Items live right now |
|---|---|
| 20% or more | 47,306 |
| 40% or more | 11,785 |
| 50% or more | 8,338 |
| 60% or more | 4,329 |
| 70% or more | 1,760 |
| 80% or more | 308 |
Roughly 9% of the catalog is at 40% off or better at any moment. Past 70% the pool thins fast, and past 80% you are down to a few hundred items chain-wide, most of them apparel in odd sizes and team gear.
Two of Dick’s own category labels are worth knowing. “Going-Going-Gone” items average 52% off. “Almost Gone Clothing” averages 75% off. If you browse the site directly, those two collections are where the floor is.
Which categories and brands mark down most
Counting live items at 40% off or deeper:
| Category | Items 40%+ off | Avg discount |
|---|---|---|
| NHL Sale & Clearance | 661 | 62% |
| Clearance Hats | 395 | 60% |
| Women’s Tops | 391 | 64% |
| Footwear | 344 | 58% |
| Almost Gone Clothing | 283 | 76% |
| Going-Going-Gone | 243 | 65% |
| Clearance Basketball | 224 | 56% |
| NWSL | 188 | 46% |
By brand, Nike alone has 1,932 items at 40% off or more, then adidas at 890, Colosseum at 783, ‘47 at 496, Fanatics at 431, Outerstuff at 377, Mitchell & Ness at 338, Under Armour at 308 and New Era at 303. Licensed team apparel brands dominate because that inventory has an expiration date built in.
How long a deep deal lasts
We took every item that first appeared at 50% off or deeper between 30 and 60 days ago and checked whether it is still listed:
- Only 11% (153 of 1,427) are still live
- Median time visible before disappearing: 44 days
- A quarter were gone within 33 days
So a half-off item at Dick’s typically survives about six weeks online, then sells out or gets pulled. That is a longer runway than Home Depot clearance, where store-level items can vanish in days, but it is not a reason to wait. The ladder keeps stepping while you wait, and the popular sizes go first.
The sold-out variant trap
This is the part nobody else writes about, because you only find it by tracking at scale.
Dick’s category pages price a product family at the cheapest variant. That cheapest variant is very often a size or color that already sold out. The listing says $28.97, you click through, and every size you can actually buy is $64.97. The search index even hides the sold-out variant, so the “deal” was never buyable to begin with.
We hit this repeatedly ourselves: notifications going out on deals that were dead on arrival. When we re-verified 49 deep-discount Dick’s and Golf Galaxy items against their product pages, 20 were dead, 18 had the wrong price, and only 11 were correct as listed.
The fix, which now runs on every Dick’s item we flag at 40% off or more, is to open the product page, read the per-variant stock status, and re-price the deal at the cheapest variant you can actually add to cart. If nothing is buyable, the deal is retracted rather than shown. If you are using any other tracker or a deal forum for Dick’s, assume the listed price might be for a phantom size until you see it in a cart.
Golf Galaxy runs on the same clock
Golf Galaxy is owned by Dick’s and shares its pricing system. Its markdowns show the same Friday concentration: 50% of all drops and 54% of drops to 40%+ land on Friday. Of the roughly 11,700 items we track there, 785 are at 40% off or more and 104 are at 70% or more right now. Golf clubs and bags carry a higher dollar value per item, so the average savings on a 40%+ Golf Galaxy deal is about $67 versus $42 at Dick’s.
A workflow that fits the schedule
- Friday morning is the primary check. Thursday evening is early for a subset of drops.
- Monday catches the cleanup pass on deep cuts.
- Track the ladder, not the price. An item on its third or fourth step is near the floor. An item on its first step will be cheaper in a week if it is still there.
- Confirm the variant before you trust a family price. Add it to cart.
- Prioritize team gear after the season ends for single-step 90% cuts.
We run this workflow automatically. Every Dick’s price change is logged within two hours of happening, deep deals are checked against the product page for buyable variants, and you can sort the live catalog by biggest recent drop at the Dick’s Sporting Goods price tracker. The markdown day-of-week comparison shows how Dick’s Friday habit compares to Walmart, Best Buy, Nordstrom Rack and others.