The Best Day to Sell on the Auction House, Tested on Our Data

The short answer

Tuesday is the best day to sell Midnight materials and consumables on the US Auction House, and Saturday is the worst, but the difference is a few percent, not a fortune. Across nine weeks of our daily history, the median price of herbs, ore, flasks and potions sat about 2 to 6 percent above its own weekly average on Tuesdays and about 3 to 5 percent below it on Fridays and Saturdays. A Tuesday price beat the following Saturday's price in roughly three weeks out of four. That is a real edge if you sell in volume, and a small one if you sell a bag of herbs. The day-to-day noise is bigger than the weekday effect, so the live strip below and the 14-day range still matter more than the calendar.

Live Auction House prices

Argentleaf Gold37 gold14-day low 12 gold high 36 gold

Azeroot Gold34 gold98 silver14-day low 18 gold high 33 gold

Nocturnal Lotus264 gold96 silver14-day low 221 gold high 260 gold

Dazzling Thorium8 gold85 silver14-day low 4 gold high 7 gold

Umbral Tin Ore Gold19 gold60 silver14-day low 3 gold high 24 gold

Flask of the Shattered Sun420 gold14-day low 371 gold high 433 gold

Flask of the Blood Knights389 gold14-day low 349 gold high 415 gold

Potion of Recklessness86 gold32 silver14-day low 69 gold high 94 gold

Lowest current buyout, US region commodity market, read from our Auction House tables. Verified19 min ago

Why people say Tuesday

The US weekly reset happens on Tuesday. Raid lockouts, the Great Vault and weekly quests all roll over that day, and raiders tend to restock flasks, potions and food before their first raid night of the week. Crafters buy herbs and ore to make those consumables, so demand for materials should rise at the start of the reset week. By the weekend, the theory goes, raid nights are done, casual players flood the house with whatever they farmed, and prices sag.

That is a good story. We wanted to know whether it shows up in actual prices, so we measured it.

How we tested it

We took thirty Midnight commodities and split them into four groups:

• Herbs: both grades of Tranquility Bloom, Sanguithorn, Azeroot, Argentleaf and Mana Lily, plus Nocturnal Lotus
• Ore: both grades of Refulgent Copper, Umbral Tin and Brilliant Silver, plus Dazzling Thorium
• Flasks: both listings of Flask of Thalassian Resistance, Flask of the Magisters, Flask of the Blood Knights and Flask of the Shattered Sun
• Potions: both listings of Potion of Recklessness and Light's Potential

For each item and each day we took the median listed price for that day from our history table. Prices drift over weeks, especially after a patch, so comparing raw Tuesday prices with raw Saturday prices would mostly measure the drift. Instead we compared each day with the average of the seven days around it (three before, the day itself, three after). A value of plus 3 percent means that day sat 3 percent above its own surrounding week. Then we averaged those values by weekday within each group. Days with fewer than six hourly readings were dropped.

The result: weekday versus its own week

Median price, each day compared with the average of the seven days around it. Positive means pricier than that week's average.

Sample sizes: between 77 and 99 item-days per weekday for herbs, 49 to 63 for ore, 56 to 72 for flasks and 28 to 36 for potions.

Read the bottom row before you get excited. A single day's price typically wanders 7 to 18 percent away from its weekly average for reasons that have nothing to do with the weekday: a big seller, a big buyer, a hotfix. The weekday effect of 2 to 6 percent is real on average and small next to that wander. That is why the advice is "lean toward Tuesday", not "only sell on Tuesday".

A second test: Tuesday against the next Saturday

Averages can hide a few big weeks. So we ran a blunter test: for each item, compare the Tuesday median with the median four days later, on Saturday, and count how often Tuesday was higher.

Roughly three Tuesdays in four beat the Saturday that followed. Some of that is the slow price decline that ran through this whole period, since a later day is a little cheaper on average when prices are drifting down, but the first table already strips most of that out and still finds the same shape.

Where the pattern weakens: the cheapest listing

The median is the middle of the ladder. Sellers compete at the bottom, so we repeated the first test with each day's lowest price instead of the median.

Herbs keep the Tuesday lead and the Saturday dip. Flasks and potions keep a weaker version. Ore loses it: on the lowest price, Thursday came out on top and the single-day spread was so wide that no weekday stands out. Our honest reading is that ore shows no reliable weekday pattern at the floor. If you sell ore, the depth of the ladder and the 14-day range are better guides than the calendar.

The hour matters more than the day for ore

Since the weekday test found nothing reliable for ore at the floor, we asked a different question: does the hour of the day matter? We took our hourly readings from 2026-09-01 to 2026-10-07 for four ores, four flasks and five herbs, compared each hour's lowest price with that item's average for the same day, and grouped the hours into four-hour blocks in UTC.

Eastern times are approximate (UTC minus four in this period). Each cell averages 416 to 595 hourly readings.

Ore has a clear daily rhythm that the weekday test missed. The floor sat about 9 percent below its daily average in the US morning and about 6 to 7 percent above it in the US evening. A plausible reading is that overnight and morning players post ore cheaply while fewer buyers are online, and crafters clear those cheap units once the evening crowd logs in. That is our interpretation, not something the data proves. Herbs and flasks show only small swings of a percent or two, inside their normal noise. The practical point for miners is simple: post ore in the US evening and buy it in the US morning.

What to do with this

1. Sell flasks, potions and herbs early in the reset week. List on Tuesday or Wednesday, for the shortest duration, so unsold stock comes back before the weekend dip.
2. Buy on Friday or Saturday. If you craft, the same pattern works for you in reverse: stock herbs and ore late in the week.
3. Time ore by the hour, not the day. The floor price of ore showed no weekday pattern, but it ran highest in the US evening and lowest in the US morning.
4. Let the range overrule the calendar. A Saturday near the 14-day high beats a Tuesday near the 14-day low every time.
5. Watch patch weeks separately. In the patch-day study the 12.1 spikes dwarfed any weekday effect.

Three myths this data does not support

• "Never sell on a weekend." Sunday came out above its weekly average for herbs and flasks in the median test. Saturday is the soft day, not the whole weekend.
• "Reset day is a jackpot." Tuesday leads, but by a few percent. If you double your prices on reset day, you will simply not sell.
• "Prices crash after raid night." Thursday and Friday sit a few percent under average, which is a dip, not a crash. A crash looks like the weeks after the 12.1 patch, when most materials lost a third or more of their value over a month and stayed down.

The common thread: the calendar nudges prices, it does not decide them. Supply from a big seller, a patch note, or the start of a new raid tier moves the market far more than the name of the day.

How big is the edge in gold?

Here is the effect on a real batch, using the prices our tables held on 2026-10-08 and the median results above. Suppose you sell 20 of the higher-priced Flask of the Shattered Sun listing each week. At 417 gold each, the batch is worth 8,340 gold at the weekly average. The Tuesday result of plus 4.9 percent is worth about 409 gold more than an average day, and the gap between Tuesday and Friday (plus 4.9 against minus 4.1, a 9 point swing) is worth about 750 gold on the same batch before the cut. For a weekly flask seller that adds up. For someone selling 200 Silver Argentleaf at 4 gold24 silver, the same 9 point swing is worth under 80 gold. Sell when it suits you.

Requirements

Level

Any level

Location

Any Auction House

Timing

US weekly reset is on Tuesday

Group

Solo

Walked route status

Weekly selling calendar

Not walked yet

No hourly gold figure is published here until this route has been walked end to end with a timer and a full loot log. Until then this page gives you the inputs (live prices and what drops) and leaves the arithmetic to you.

The query, for the curious

For each of the thirty items we read the daily median from our US commodity history, kept days with at least six hourly readings, divided each day by the average of the surrounding seven days, and averaged the result by ISO weekday and group, keeping only days with a full seven-day window. The Tuesday and Saturday test pairs each Tuesday with the day four days later for the same item. Nothing was smoothed, trimmed or hand-picked.

Related reading

New to selling? Start with Auction House basics. For how the ladder moves within a day, read the commodity market explainer. For what a raider spends each week, and therefore what they buy on Tuesday, see the costed Midnight budget. Every market guide sits on the Auction House hub.

Changelog

• 2026-10-08: First version. Weekday query run on 2026-10-08 against our US daily commodity history, 2026-07-31 to 2026-10-07; hour-of-day query against our hourly history, 2026-09-01 to 2026-10-07; item data from our datamine of client build 12.1.0.69933.