Top 25 DMAs for Black Friday Shopping: Matching Retail Strategy to Market Surges

As you plan your retail holiday campaigns, success hinges on truly understanding your core audience and current market dynamics. In this analysis, we examined Foursquare’s aggregated foot traffic data across the nation’s 25 largest retail markets on Black Friday 2025. The data reveals dramatic regional shifts in shopper urgency, providing a framework for smarter directional 2026 planning aligned with real-world foot traffic.

Key Takeaways

• Market size does not dictate single-day behavior surges. While mega-metros like New York and Los Angeles drive massive overall foot traffic volume, markets like Chicago (+57.77%) and Orlando (+55.56%) experience the strongest single-day behavioral spikes, suggesting that consumers in these regions disproportionately concentrate holiday spending into Black Friday itself.
• Regional dynamics dictate event responsiveness: Midwest and Sun Belt markets occupy six of the top seven % change spots (Chicago, Orlando, Miami, St. Louis, Denver, Atlanta, Indianapolis). In mid-size, price-sensitive, or seasonally variable markets, Black Friday acts as a sharp event trigger, whereas dense coastal metros operate with elevated retail traffic year-round.
• Activating campaigns purely at the national level obscures the true value of each market: The massive gap in single day foot traffic growth, from a +58% spike in Chicago down to +12% in Seattle, shows how dramatically local dynamics alter shopping habits. It’s important to note, the markets lower on this list are not weak advertising areas; they still rank in the top DMA tier for total national volume. A lower growth percentage simply indicates year-round shopping consistency rather than a single-day rush.

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Strategic Playbook for Black Friday 2026: Balancing Foot Traffic by Market

Evaluating retail foot traffic across the nation’s top 25 DMAs by volume highlights a core strategic divide between steady foot traffic volume and high-surge visitation from tentpole events. Rather than treating Black Friday as a uniform national event, brands achieve maximum return on ad spend (ROAS) by matching media execution to local market behavior: deploying short-burst, high-intensity activations in surge-heavy regional markets, while maintaining sustained, year-round competitive positioning in high-baseline metropolitan hubs.

Market Performance Tiers

• High-Surge Event Hubs (>42% Foot Traffic Growth): Markets such as Chicago, Orlando, St. Louis, Miami, Denver, Atlanta, and Indianapolis experience Black Friday as an acute behavioral shift. Shoppers in these DMAs heavily concentrate their visitation (and therefore likely spending activity) onto Black Friday. These hubs are particularly well-suited for concentrated budget flighting, time-sensitive doorbusters, and short-burst activations designed to capture sudden surges in buyer intent.
• High-Volume Anchors (27% to 41% Foot Traffic Growth): Led by New York, as well as markets like Dallas and Houston, these major metros combine substantial baseline traffic with healthy holiday increases. Serving as essential drivers for overall campaign scale, these markets tend to reward broad-reach, multi-day promotional strategies that protect market share and capture large transaction volumes.
• Steady Baseline Performers (<26% Foot Traffic Growth): Dense markets like Los Angeles, Houston, Sacramento, and Seattle-Tacoma maintain heavy retail traffic year-round, meaning the holiday buying season spreads across several weeks rather than spiking on Black Friday. Media spend in these DMAs often performs best when paced evenly across the entire holiday flight, using multi-week campaign narratives rather than heavy day-of budget spikes or short-burst activations.

Top 25 DMAs by Visit Volume, Ranked by Black Friday 2025 Foot Traffic Growth (%)

Rank	DMA	Foot Traffic % Change
1	Chicago	57.77%
2	Orlando	55.56%
3	Miami-Ft Lauderdale	47.0%
4	St Louis	45.24%
5	Denver	43.32%
6	Atlanta	43.25%
7	Indianapolis	42.54%
8	Detroit	41.63%
9	Minneapolis-St Paul	41.01%
10	Nashville	39.41%
11	New York	38.02%
12	Philadelphia	37.11%
13	San Francisco	34.2%
14	Tampa-St Petersburg	33.95%
15	Charlotte	33.13%
16	Boston	32.6%
17	Washington DC	29.71%
18	Raleigh-Durham	27.93%
19	Cleveland-Akron	27.91%
20	Phoenix	27.63%
21	Dallas-Ft Worth	26.24%
22	Los Angeles	25.47%
23	Houston	21.4%
24	Sacramento	16.17%
25	Seattle-Tacoma	12.51%

Methodology

Foursquare’s privacy-forward, aggregated movements data uses verified first-party visits from our O&O apps as a core data source to build highly accurate visitation models. By analyzing movement patterns independent of media exposure, this data provides directional insights for campaign planning and a clearer, more holistic view of performance and market dynamics. 

This analysis looks at the top 25 U.S. DMAs, identified based on total retail visitation volume, then ranked by percentage change in foot traffic. Foot Traffic % Change identifies store visit volume on Black Friday (Nov 28, 2025) compared against a four-week baseline average of the immediately preceding Fridays (Oct 31, Nov 7, Nov 14, and Nov 21, 2025). Averaging four prior weeks smooths out single-week anomalies—such as severe weather or early promotional drops—providing an accurate picture of true event-driven visitation growth versus standard seasonal Friday activity. The top 25 DMA’s by foot traffic volume are categorized into strategic performance tiers based on the % change in foot traffic.