Which Home Depot Departments Get the Deepest Markdowns (Scan Data, September 2026)
Every other article on this question lists departments from memory. We counted. Paint, lighting, and cleaning supplies clear the deepest; tools and bath barely clear at all.
Ask which Home Depot department has the best clearance and you get the same answer everywhere: paint, seasonal, maybe appliances. Those answers come from intuition. Nobody publishing them has counted.
We have a database of clearance prices scanned store by store, so we counted. Between August 19 and September 6, 2026, our scans covered 389 Home Depot stores and turned up 2,703 distinct products on clearance with a markdown, across 121,045 store-level listings. We folded Home Depot's category paths into 14 departments and ranked them by how deep the discounts actually went.
The short answer
Paint is the deepest-discounted department, and it is not close. Six in ten paint products we saw were marked down 90% or more in at least one store. Lighting and cleaning supplies come next, then electrical and flooring. At the bottom sit tools and bath, where a typical clearance item has lost about half its price and the bulk of the inventory never gets past that.
| Department | Products | Median discount | 75%+ off | 90%+ off | Median best price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paint | 108 | 90% | 83% | 62% | $3.35 |
| Lighting and fans | 147 | 87% | 76% | 46% | $3.90 |
| Cleaning and laundry | 198 | 87% | 69% | 39% | $2.25 |
| Electrical and smart home | 111 | 85% | 69% | 28% | $9.00 |
| Flooring and rugs | 217 | 85% | 58% | 18% | $6.60 |
| Doors and windows | 126 | 80% | 71% | 6% | $32.50 |
| Building materials | 298 | 80% | 60% | 2% | $9.02 |
| Storage and garage | 167 | 78% | 63% | 11% | $7.50 |
| Hardware | 176 | 78% | 56% | 1% | $7.45 |
| Outdoor and garden | 564 | 76% | 65% | 24% | $7.13 |
| Plumbing and HVAC | 39 | 75% | 56% | 10% | $11.61 |
| Kitchen and appliances | 76 | 66% | 38% | 4% | $81.75 |
| Tools | 227 | 56% | 30% | 3% | $25.00 |
| Bath | 117 | 41% | 27% | 2% | $95.60 |
How to read it: “Median discount” is the middle product's best markdown across the stores that carry it. “75%+ off” and “90%+ off” are the share of that department's products that reached those levels somewhere. “Median best price” is what the middle product cost at its cheapest store, which is the fastest way to see that a 41% markdown in bath still leaves you paying $95.
How we counted, in three sentences
Every row in our listings table is one product at one store, with the shelf price, the clearance price, the stock count, and the date we saw it. We kept every clearance row with a markdown of at least 1% across 389 stores and 19 days, grouped products by the first segment of Home Depot's own category path, and merged that segment into the 14 departments above. About 9% of rows carried no category and were left out, as were brand landing pages, workwear, automotive, and sports gear, which together held 184 products that do not map to a store department.
This is not a national sample. It is 389 stores out of roughly 2,000, weighted toward the metro areas our members live in, over a window that starts in late August. Read the numbers as a large, dated snapshot, not as Home Depot policy.
Department by department
Paint: discontinued stains and additives, not gallons of color
The paint department's reputation comes from the “oops” shelf of mistinted gallons. That is not what drives our numbers. The deepest markdowns we scanned were exterior wood stains and paint additives that Home Depot has stopped carrying: a 5 gal. clear CWF-UV exterior wood finish at $6.20 off a $143 shelf price in Hendersonville, North Carolina (#3637, seen August 31), a 1 gal. solid-color exterior wood stain at $3.60 off $37.98 in Brooklyn (#6158, August 29), and a 1 lb. bag of decorative color chips at $0.70 off $18.98 in San Diego (#1032, September 2). Discontinued chemistry has no next season to wait for, so it goes to 90% and beyond quickly. Most of it was in a single store each.
Lighting and fans: the widest deep markdowns in the store
Lighting is where deep and widespread overlap. A 2 ft. LED garage shop light was $3.60 off $35.97 in Houston (#0577, August 28) and the same SKU was on clearance in 62 of our stores. A 40 in. motion-sensing linkable shop light hit $4 off $39.97 in West Covina, California (#8463, September 4) and showed up in 37 stores. When Home Depot drops a fixture from the planogram, every store clears it at once, which is why 46% of lighting products reached 90% off somewhere. If you only check one aisle for chain-wide deals, make it this one.
Cleaning and laundry: cheap to begin with, nearly free at the end
Cleaning had the lowest median best price of any department at $2.25. Trash bags dominate: a 150-count box of 13 gal. drawstring kitchen bags was $0.80 off $19.97 in Columbia, South Carolina (#1109, September 6), and a 140-count competitor box was $1 off $19.97 in Coldwater, Michigan (#2766, August 31). Most of these were single-store sightings, which fits what cleaning clearance usually is: a store overordered one brand, and it has to leave the shelf before the next case arrives.
Electrical and smart home: cameras and safety gear
Two plug-in security cameras from different brands both dropped to $10 off $99.99, one in Lincoln, Nebraska (#3204, August 29) and one in Souderton, Pennsylvania (#4158, August 29). A 5.5 lb. fire extinguisher was $5.30 off $62.53 in Chattanooga (#0742, August 28). Smart home hardware ages out fast when the manufacturer ships a new generation, and the old generation cannot be returned to the vendor, so it clears hard.
Flooring and rugs: supplies clear, flooring itself does not
The department average hides a split. Flooring supplies (mortar, grout, trim) had a median discount of 90% across 15 products, and a peel-and-stick rug runner edge at $0.50 off $11.98 was on clearance in 99 of our stores, seen most recently in Baton Rouge (#0367, August 31). Actual tile and vinyl planks sat closer to 50% off, because a half-price box of tile still sells to someone finishing a room. Two 50 lb. bags of thinset mortar at $3.50 and $3.09 off about $35 (Glendale, Arizona #0475 and Baton Rouge #0370) show how far the supplies side goes.
Outdoor and garden: two departments wearing one name
Outdoor is the largest department in our data by far, 564 products and 38,348 store listings, and its 76% median is an average of two very different things. The garden center side (214 products) had a median discount of 90% and produced every near-penny price we saw: 22 products at ten cents or less, including a 15-count box of termite stakes at $0.10 off $63 in Leavenworth, Kansas (#2216, September 4) and a 2 cu. ft. bag of bark mulch nuggets at $0.10 off $6.27 in Upland, California (#0687, August 29). Patio furniture (132 products, 17,034 listings) had a median of 60%.
That patio number matters because the standard advice says September is when patio furniture hits 50% to 90% off. Our scans agree on the range and disagree on the center of it. In the first week of September, the typical patio set had lost 60% and most of the inventory was still sitting between 50% and 75%. The 90% cuts exist, but they are the tail, not the rule, at least this early in the season. Our guide to how the markdown cycle works explains why that tail arrives on a different date at every store.
Doors, building materials, storage, hardware: solid, rarely extreme
These four departments cluster around an 80% median with almost no 90% tail. A 36 in. by 84 in. frosted-glass barn door at $66.25 off $738 in Signal Hill, California (#1062, September 6) is the kind of find doors and windows produces: big-ticket, discontinued, and usually in one or two stores. Building materials had the most products of any department after outdoor (298) but only 2% reached 90% off. Heavy, bulky stock gets marked down to move, then moves.
Kitchen and appliances, tools, and bath: where clearance is shallow
Appliances are on every “best clearance” list, and in our data they are the second-shallowest department, with a median best price of $81.75 and only 4% of products reaching 90% off. The deepest kitchen markdown we saw was a washing machine hose at $1.88 off $24.98 in Laguna Niguel, California (#1077, September 5), an accessory rather than an appliance. Floor-model discounts are real, but they are negotiated at the desk and never show up as a clearance SKU.
Tools had 227 products on clearance, more than paint and lighting combined, but a median markdown of 56% and a median best price of $25. The 90% examples were peripheral: a 3-pack of emergency road flares at $1.30 off $12.98 in Chicago (#1986, August 31), an 18V jobsite fan at $8.90 off $79.99 in Fresno. Brand-name power tools hold value, get bought at 30% off, and never reach the deep end.
Bath was the shallowest department in the store: a 41% median, a $95.60 median best price, and vanities and faucets that mostly stopped at 25% off. A ceramic corner shelf at $3.70 off $24.97 was the best we found, and it was on clearance in 13 stores.
The deepest markdowns are also the widest
One pattern cut across every department and surprised us. Products that reached 90% off were on clearance in a median of 29 of our stores. Products that topped out between 75% and 89% were in a median of 7 stores. Products under 50% off were in a median of 3.
The explanation is the same one that makes lighting so strong. The deepest cuts come from chain-wide discontinuations, where corporate drops a SKU and every store clears it on the same clock. Shallow cuts come from one store's local overstock. So the 90% items are not rare lucky finds at one location. They are the items most likely to be marked down at your store too, which is the opposite of how most people picture penny hunting.
What this means for a visit
- Walk paint, lighting, and cleaning first. Those aisles hold the highest odds of a 90% tag, and the lighting finds are the ones most likely to be at your store as well as ours.
- In the garden center, look at consumables (mulch, pest control, edging, chemicals) before furniture. That is where the ten-cent prices were.
- Treat tools, appliances, and bath as places to buy at 30% to 50% if you need the item, not places to wait for a penny. The wait usually ends with the item gone at half price.
- Read the tag date. A deep markdown with a recent date holds; an older one is about to move again or disappear. Our tag reading guide covers what the date and the price ending tell you.
See the current markdowns at your store
These figures are a snapshot dated September 6, 2026, and every price in them has probably moved since. The point of the analysis is the ranking, not the individual prices. To see what is marked down at a specific store today, check the current markdowns near you, which show the store, the price, and the date we saw it, with a 48-hour delay. Members get the same scan without the delay, plus alerts when an item at their own store steps down. Start a free 3-day trial to see your store's latest scan.
We will rerun these numbers when the sample grows materially or the season turns, and date each revision here.