Steam Autumn Sale 2026: Dates (October 1–8) and Expected Discounts

If you still expect Steam's autumn discounts at the end of November, you're likely to miss them. The Steam Autumn Sale 2026 opens on the first day of October and ends before many people even remember it exists: this is the second year in a row Valve has held it in early autumn.

Status: dates are officially confirmed. The sale runs from Thursday, October 1, 2026, 8pm MSK, to Thursday, October 8, 2026, 8pm MSK. It lasts exactly 7 days.

The Steam Autumn Sale 2026 runs October 1–8. Discounts go live on October 1 at 10am Pacific Time, which is 8pm in Moscow, and end on October 8 at the same hour. Valve published the dates in the official Steamworks documentation. The late-November Autumn Sale, the norm until 2024, is gone.

Below: the exact start time for CIS cities, the history of the move, the rules that decide which games get discounted, discount benchmarks and a checklist for the last 48 hours before launch. At the end there's a short section for anyone who resells Steam top-ups through a bot or an online store.

Steam Autumn Sale 2026 at a glance

• Dates: October 1–8, 2026, start and end at 8pm MSK. Valve confirmed them in Steamworks.
• Length: 7 days. The Autumn Sale is one of two short seasonal events: the Summer Sale lasts 14 days, the Winter Sale 18.
• Not in November: since 2025 the sale has moved from Thanksgiving week to the turn of September and October.
• Games: the full list isn't known before launch. Games released no later than September 1, 2026, are eligible.
• Discounts: they hold for the whole event and don't grow toward the end. After October 8 there are about ten weeks without seasonal sales until the Winter Sale.

When does the Steam Autumn Sale 2026 start?

The Steam Autumn Sale 2026 starts on October 1 at 8pm MSK and ends on October 8 at 8pm MSK. Valve set the start for 10am Pacific Time. In early October California is still on daylight saving time (UTC−7), so the gap with Moscow is exactly 10 hours.

If you're not in the Moscow time zone, the start and end fall at this local time:

• Moscow, Minsk — 8pm;
• Yerevan — 9pm;
• Astana, Tashkent, Dushanbe, Ashgabat — 10pm;
• Bishkek — 11pm.

The sale ends on October 8 at the same local time. If you're planning to buy "the morning after the sale," October 9 will already be too late.

Searches for a "Steam sale in October" now point to the Autumn Sale itself, not minor themed events. So if you're asking whether Steam has a sale on October 1, the answer is simple: yes.

How to check the date yourself

Valve publishes seasonal sale dates for developers in Steamworks well in advance. That's the primary source news sites rely on. The second handy option is the Steam sales history and calendar on SteamDB: it has a countdown to the next event and dates from previous years.

If an article's dates don't match these two sources, trust the sources, not the article. That way you won't fall for outdated posts that still place the Autumn Sale at the end of November.

One more practical detail: in the first minutes after launch the store is often overloaded and pages load slower than usual. The discount won't disappear in the meantime — the price is the same for the whole event — so there's no need to storm the storefront at 8:00:01pm. If discounts don't show on a game's page, restart the client or wait a few minutes.

Is there a Steam sale in November? Why the date moved

There will be a Steam Autumn Sale in 2026, just not in November: it runs October 1–8, the second year in a row it lands in early autumn. Anyone looking for the Autumn Sale with November in mind is essentially six weeks late.

From its introduction through 2024, the Autumn Sale took place at the end of November, during the week of US Thanksgiving, overlapping with Black Friday. In the 2025 calendar Valve moved it: the sale ran from September 29 to October 6. The same pattern holds in 2026.

Demand followed the dates. According to Yandex Wordstat, the Russian query for "Steam autumn sale" was searched more than 112,000 times in September 2025, about 16,000 times in October and fewer than 3,000 times in November. Interest peaked in September 2025, the month the sale started, while November — the traditional month in earlier years — was almost empty. The pattern repeats in 2026: interest in August grew almost fourfold compared with July.

What the move means for players

For buyers, the consequences matter more than the reasons:

• The Autumn Sale and Black Friday no longer overlap. Valve hasn't announced November discount dates for 2026 yet.
• The gap before the Winter Sale is longer. After October 8, the next major seasonal event starts only on December 17 — roughly ten weeks later.
• Old reminders will let you down. Delete that "Autumn Sale — late November" note from your calendar, or you'll find out about the discounts after they've ended.
• Planning is easier. An October sale doesn't compete with other stores' November promotions, and you can split your gaming budget into two waves: early October and late December.

Which games will be in the Autumn Sale

There's no full list of Steam Autumn Sale 2026 games before launch: discounts appear in the store on October 1 at 8pm MSK. At the time of writing, Valve hasn't revealed participating games or released a sale trailer. We'll update this article with actual data after launch.

Most people asking which games will be discounted mean the big hits. Based on past sales, these regularly take part:

• Cyberpunk 2077;
• Red Dead Redemption 2;
• Hogwarts Legacy;
• Baldur's Gate 3;
• Elden Ring;
• The Witcher 3;
• God of War.

Indie games are even harder to predict. Only their developers know in advance whether Astroneer or Planet Crafter will be discounted. Survival and crafting games often go into themed fests instead: the most recent Survival & Crafting PvE fest, which ran August 31 – September 7, featured exactly these kinds of games.

If you're waiting for the next Rust sale on Steam, the most reliable option is to add the game to your wishlist. Steam will email you as soon as the price drops, so you won't have to check the page every day.

Why the game you want might not be on sale

A favorite game missing from the sale often surprises people, but the reasons are usually simple:

1. The game is too new. Under the Steamworks seasonal sale rules, a game can take part with a discount only if it was released at least 30 days before the event begins. For the 2026 Autumn Sale that means a release no later than September 1, 2026.
2. The new release has a launch discount. If a game launched with a discount, it usually doesn't qualify for the next seasonal sale.
3. The publisher opted out. Discounts in a seasonal sale are voluntary: Valve sets the framework, while the rights holder chooses whether to participate and at what percentage.
4. The game isn't available in your region. The publisher also decides availability and pricing for each account region, so a discounted game from someone else's review may not be on sale for you.

If a game came out after September 1, 2026, there's little point waiting for it in the Autumn Sale — the Winter Sale is a better bet.

Steam Autumn Sale discounts: what to expect

There's no single discount percentage for the Autumn Sale: each publisher sets its own. Based on last year's sale, here's a rough benchmark: fresh big releases dropped by about a third or 40%, while older games went 80% off or more.

A few 2025 Autumn Sale prices for reference:

• Doom: The Dark Ages — from $70 to $47;
• Assassin's Creed Shadows — from $70 to $42;
• Cyberpunk 2077 — $21;
• Mafia 3: Definitive Edition — $3.

Prices are in US dollars; the final amount in your region may differ. How much a specific game will be discounted in 2026 will only be clear on October 1 at 8pm MSK. Any "exact discount predictions" before then are guesswork.

Do games get cheaper toward the end of the sale?

No. During a seasonal sale, prices don't drop further, and there are no extra discounts toward the end. Waiting for the last day gains you nothing but adds risk: on October 8 at 8pm MSK prices go back to normal, and the Winter Sale is more than two months away.

How to tell a genuinely good deal

• Compare with the historical low. SteamDB has price histories: if the current price matches the lowest or is close to it, there's nothing to wait for.
• Check editions. Sometimes a discounted deluxe edition costs almost as much as the base game at full price.
• Look at DLC. For games you bought long ago, a sale is a good moment to pick up the expansions.
• Don't buy "just in case." An 80% discount on a game you'll never play is spending, not saving.

Checklist: 48 hours before launch

Spend the last two days before October 1 preparing rather than waiting. Here's the order:

1. Clean up your wishlist. Remove what no longer interests you and turn on discount notifications: Steam emails you when a wishlisted game gets cheaper.
2. Write down your top 5–10 games and find the historical low for each. At 8pm on October 1 you'll only need to compare numbers, not look them up.
3. Set a budget. A fixed amount decided in advance protects you from impulse buys on the first evening.
4. Top up your Steam balance in advance. Then buying at launch takes a couple of clicks and doesn't depend on how fast a payment goes through. At KRAB.GG it works like this: Steam top-up by login, paid in rubles — you enter the amount in dollars, from $0.5 to $1000, and exactly that amount lands on your balance; no account password needed. Prices and exchange rates fluctuate, and the final ruble total is shown at checkout before you confirm.
5. Check your region and game availability. Open the pages of the games on your list and make sure the purchase button is there.
6. Set two reminders: one for October 1, 8pm MSK, adjusted for your time zone, and one for October 8, a couple of hours before the sale ends.

If you've done everything on the list, the evening of October 1 comes down to a quick check: open your wishlist, compare prices with the lows you wrote down, and buy what dropped to your target. The rest can wait until winter.

What happens on Steam after October 8

After the Autumn Sale, Steam switches to themed fests, and the next major seasonal sale is the Winter Sale, from December 17, 2026, to January 4, 2027. The schedule Valve publishes for developers looks like this:

• Cooking Fest — October 12–19;
• Steam Next Fest: October Edition — October 19–26;
• Steam Scream Fest 5 — October 26 – November 2;
• Auto Battler RPG Fest — November 16–23;
• Black Friday — Valve will announce dates later;
• Winter Sale — December 17, 2026 – January 4, 2027.

A fest is not the same as a seasonal sale: discounts cover games of one genre or theme, not the whole catalog. So is there a Steam sale in November? No seasonal one, yes a themed fest, and the scale and dates of any Black Friday discounts in 2026 aren't officially confirmed yet.

Sources disagree on the Steam Awards nominations. Some outlets say voting starts alongside the Autumn Sale; others note that in 2025 nominations ran separately, from November 24 to December 1. There's no official announcement for 2026 yet, and we won't guess.

For your wallet, the takeaway is simple: the week of October 1–8 is the last big chance to buy games on sale until mid-December.

If you resell Steam top-ups

For owners of Telegram bots and online stores that resell Steam top-ups, the Autumn Sale mainly means load. Expect a spike in orders from 8pm MSK on October 1 and through the first two days, as buyers fund their wallets for their wishlists. Manual fulfillment on a night like that means queues, typos in logins and a late shift.

If you fulfill orders through the KRAB.GG partner API, check five things before launch:

1. Balance. All orders are charged to a single USDT balance. You top it up with USDT on the TON network to the address with the mandatory memo from GET /deposit; without the memo the funds can't be credited. Top up ahead of time, not in the middle of the rush.
2. Price and markup. Steam top-ups through the API carry no fee, and the dollar amount you set lands on the buyer's balance as is. GET /price returns the exact order cost; you set your own markup.
3. Duplicate protection. Repeating a request with the same orderId returns the existing order and never charges twice, which covers double taps. The same orderId with a different type, qty or username gets 409 order_id_conflict.
4. Asynchronous delivery. Stars, Premium and GRAM are delivered synchronously within seconds, while Steam is asynchronous: the outcome arrives via the order.completed or order.failed webhook, signed with HMAC-SHA256 in the X-Webhook-Signature header. Don't keep the buyer on a loading screen waiting for a synchronous response.
5. Rate limits. The per-minute request limit is shared across your whole account: live and test keys spend the same counter. When you exceed it, the API returns 429 with a Retry-After header, so build a queue that retries based on that header before the peak.

A top-up order looks like this:

```http
POST https://api.krab.gg/v1/orders
Authorization: Bearer sk_test_...
Content-Type: application/json

{"type":"steam","qty":10,"username":"steam_login","orderId":"shop-1042"}
```

Here qty is the top-up amount in dollars and username is the Steam login without @. With an sk_test_… key or the "dryRun": true field, the order runs in the sandbox with no charges.

If an order comes back with status failed, check the reason and retryable fields. With retryable: true the money is already back on your balance, and retrying with a new orderId makes sense. With under_review the funds are held pending a manual check — don't create a duplicate.

Details are in the partner API documentation and the endpoint reference. Keys are issued in the @apistarsbot cabinet; a key is shown once and can be revoked instantly.

Bottom line: top up your balance in advance

The Steam Autumn Sale 2026 runs October 1–8, starting and ending at 8pm MSK (10am Pacific), and there's no longer a November Autumn Sale. The game list will only be known after launch, discounts don't grow toward the end of the week, and after October 8 there are about ten weeks until the Winter Sale.

The main advice follows from that: top up your balance and prepare your wishlist before October 1, so at launch all that's left is to click "Buy." This applies both to players and to those who resell top-ups: for a store, the balance is the USDT account in the partner cabinet, and it needs to be funded on the peak night. After launch we'll update the article with actual discounts.