For US sportsbooks, Thanksgiving week is no longer just a nice bump on the calendar – it’s turning into a mini Super Bowl spread out over four standalone NFL windows from Thursday to Black Friday. With three traditional games on Thanksgiving Day and a nationally televised Black Friday matchup, operators are bracing for one of the busiest betting stretches of the entire season.
Handle on Thanksgiving has been climbing steadily for years as more states legalise wagering and mobile apps put lines in everyone’s pocket. Sportsbooks describe the week as one of the busiest of the year, with action not only on the NFL tripleheader but also on college football rivalry games and early-season NBA and NHL slates.
The NFL has leaned into that momentum. This year’s Thanksgiving menu features three games with playoff implications, capped by a primetime showdown in Baltimore, while Friday delivers a standalone Bears–Eagles clash on national TV. That combination of marquee brands, staggered kickoffs and wall-to-wall coverage is expected to produce unprecedented wagering volume across regulated US books.
The Black Friday game, still a relatively new addition to the schedule, is quickly finding its footing. After a solid debut in 2023, subsequent editions have seen strong year-on-year growth in viewership, underlining how fast the day-after-Thanksgiving slot is maturing as a broadcast and betting property.
Operators are responding with aggressive promotions: profit boosts tied to Thanksgiving parlays, “bet and get” offers on anytime touchdown scorers, and cross-sport bonuses that link the NFL slate with college football and basketball. Major brands openly market the holiday as a multi-day betting festival, encouraging customers to keep accounts funded from Thursday’s early kick in Detroit through Friday’s primetime finish.
There’s also a cultural feedback loop at work. As more US households sit down to turkey with mobile apps open – checking live odds between drives or sweating player-prop ladders – Thanksgiving football is evolving from a passive TV ritual into an interactive betting event. Analysts estimate that tens of millions of Americans will place at least one wager over the long weekend, even if only a low-stakes same-game parlay to spice up the halftime show.
For international observers, the message is clear: Thanksgiving and Black Friday now form a compact, four-game festival that concentrates viewership, marketing and betting volume in a way few other weeks can match. From the perspective of US sportsbooks, it’s an almost imbatible calendar asset.
