When Do Jeans Go on Sale? (Not the Week Everyone's Emailing You About)

The emails started in the third week of July and haven’t stopped. Gap’s Friends & Family, 40 percent off everything, denim included, live since August 13. Old Navy with jeans from $22 in stores this week, select styles. American Eagle, which told Modern Retail it kicked off back-to-school on July 22 and will keep it going for ten weeks, because, in the words of its marketing chief Craig Brommers, “back-to-school is our Super Bowl.” Abercrombie’s CEO Fran Horowitz-Bonadies called the season “usually a big time for denim” on the May earnings call. So if you’re standing in front of a denim wall this week with the vague sense that this is when jeans are cheap, that’s not an accident. It’s the industry’s biggest denim moment, and it wants you to feel it.

I haven’t been to a mall for this. I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics instead.

An American Eagle in-store denim wall, folded jeans stacked by wash on white shelves under a lit sign, racks of shirts in front — The denim wall at an American Eagle store, jeans folded by wash under the sign. Photo: Ludovic Delot via Pexels.

The BLS doesn’t publish a jeans index. The closest lines it keeps are “men’s pants and shorts” and “women’s suits and separates,” collected from real shelf prices, sales included, every month. Neither is pure denim, and I’ll say that again at the end. But when a price line built mostly from pants dips, jeans are in the dip. Here is each month as a percentage of that year’s high, January 2023 through the latest release, July 2026. October 2025 is missing because the government was shut.

Month	Men’s pants, 2023	2024	2025	Women’s separates, 2023	2024	2025
April	99	100	100	97	99	100
July	98	98	95	91	92	92
August	96	96	98	95	96	96
September	98	98	100	99	100	100
November	92	95	94	94	92	94
December	90	95	92	91	90	92
January (next)	98	97	97	92	93	93

Are jeans actually cheaper during back-to-school sales?

Back-to-school August is a real dip and a shallow one, about four points under the spring high on the men’s pants line, while the women’s line steps up from July, when summer clearance is emptying the tables. Then September, the month the fall jeans arrive and the ads run, snaps back to within a point or two of the spring high on both lines, and in 2025 it was the high.

When are jeans cheapest, month by month?

December is the floor on the men’s pants line, five to ten points below the spring high in each of the three years, and the women’s line hits bottom twice: once in July and once again across December and January.

Brick-fronted Levi's shop in York in May, a window decal reading Introducing Lightweight Denim beside a mannequin in a denim skirt, no sale signage — The same brand in May: a Levi's in York, England, new denim in the window and no sale decal in sight. Photo: Malcolmxl5 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The brands’ own dates say the same thing from the other side. Levi’s ran 40 percent off sitewide for Black Friday 2024, a 505 down from $70 to $42, and did it again in November 2025 with some styles at 55. Gap’s 40 percent is a Friends & Family event, and it ran one last October too, so this month’s isn’t a once-a-year door. The one honest pre-season exception is the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale, July 18 to August 9 this year, where premium denim that otherwise never moves gets marked down before fall, and it closed nine days ago.

Two dress forms in light-wash patchwork jeans, one in a chambray shirt and one in a white eyelet camisole, against draped indigo cloth — Fall denim on dress forms in front of indigo cloth, from the brand's own account. Via @abercrombie. View on Instagram

Now the caveats I promised. The men’s line includes chinos and shorts, and the women’s line includes blazers, so a denim-only index might sit a point or two off these. The 2025 floor was shallower than 2023’s on both lines, which is the same tariff-shaped flattening we saw in the coat data. And a percent-off email is not a price level: 40 percent off a $98 pair in August and 40 percent off the same pair in November is the same $59, and the CPI is telling you which month more of the wall is at $59.

So, the pair in your cart. If it’s a style you already own and love, from a brand running a real named event this month, the August dip is a fine time to rebuy, and our sale table says which events are real. If it’s a new fall silhouette you saw in a campaign, that’s the September full-price window dressed up as a sale, and December has come in five to ten points under that window three years running. Fourteen weeks from today. Or, if you can wait for the second floor, next July, when nobody is emailing you about denim at all.