In Spain, a "día sin IVA" (no-VAT day) does not save you 21%: it saves you 17.36%. It is not a trick by the shop, it is arithmetic, and hardly anyone does the sum. The same goes for the sales and Black Friday: what decides whether a discount is real is not the sign in the window, but what the price was before. And that is set by law.
The no-VAT day sum
The standard 21% VAT (IVA) is calculated on the price before tax, not on the final price. An item that costs €121 in the shop window is worth €100 before tax: taking off the VAT means €21 off, but off €121, not off €100. And 21 divided by 121 is 17.36%.
The campaign is real and so is the saving; it is simply a fifth smaller than almost everyone assumes. With reduced-rate VAT the difference is smaller, but it goes in the same direction. A quick rule: the effective discount on a no-VAT day is always less than the VAT rate it advertises.
Which price counts in a sale (this the law does say)
When a shop advertises a reduced product, the previous price must be shown next to the reduced price — and the previous price means the lowest that same product has had in the preceding thirty days. It is in article 20 ofLey 7/1996 de Ordenación del Comercio Minorista (Spanish Retail Trade Regulation Act) ↗.
That rule exists to stop the classic trick: raising the price two weeks before the sales so that a much bigger discount than the real one can be advertised afterwards. If you see a "−60%" whose starting price has not been seen for months, something does not add up, and now you know what to compare it against.
"Up to 70%" means something other than what it seems
"Up to" describes the best case in the whole catalogue, not your purchase. A single discontinued item can be the one with that 70%, and everything else 5%. It is neither illegal nor a lie; it simply does not answer the question that interests you. Look at the discount on the specific product you want, never at the shop-window headline.
How to check it yourself, without trusting anyone
- Take a screenshot beforehand. If you already know what you want to buy in the sales, save the price a few weeks earlier: it is the proof no campaign can argue with.
- Compare the price, not the percentage. The number that matters is what you pay, not what they say they are taking off.
- Distrust the clock. Countdowns and "only 3 left" are there to stop you comparing. If the discount is good today, it is still good ten minutes from now.
The 2026 dates
Black Friday 2026 is Friday 27 November and Cyber Monday isMonday 30 November. These are not legal dates but commercial-calendar ones: each shop decides when its campaign starts and ends, and many announce it days earlier or stretch it across the whole week. So the 27th and the 30th are reference points, not guaranteed deadlines.
On those dates we will publish only promotions with an official source and an end date, like the rest of the catalogue. Anything we cannot pin down — what it discounts, on what conditions and until when — does not go in, and whatever expires moves to the archive with its date in plain view.
What we do with these campaigns
We publish a promotion only if we can say exactly what it discounts, on what conditions and until when, with its official source linked. That is why you will not see a bare "up to −80% on Black Friday" here: if we cannot pin it down, it does not go in. The other side of this is in the guide onhow to spot a fake code, and the detail of the method is in how we verify.