The Real 2019 Coupon Insert Schedule

Despite the ever-present predictions of paper coupons’ eventual demise, 2019 is shaping up to be a good year for insert coupons. One insert provider is publishing on more Sundays than it has in seven years. The end-of-the-year coupon drought won’t last quite as long as it has in recent years. And there are only a handful of dates when we’ll have no insert coupons at all.

Those are some of the highlights of the official, accurate, exclusive Coupons in the News 2019 Sunday coupon insert schedule.

Why official, accurate and exclusive, when there are already a bunch of “insert schedules” floating around the blogosphere and on social media? Because those schedules are mere guesses “based on past trends” – and many of those guesses are not correct. This schedule is the only one based on the actual publication plans for News America Marketing’s SmartSource, Valassis’ RetailMeNot Everyday, and Procter & Gamble’s brandSAVER. So if you truly want to know when to expect inserts and when you might want to buy extra newspapers, be sure to rely on the schedule that won’t steer you wrong.

The good news heading into 2019 is that there will be only four weeks when there are no inserts at all, for the first time since 2016. There were five insert-free weeks the past couple of years, largely due to the timing of Christmas and New Year’s, which caused SmartSource and RetailMeNot Everyday (formerly RedPlum) to take the last three weeks of the year off instead of the last two.

SmartSource is the star of the coupon calendar, with publications planned on 44 out of 52 Sundays – the most weekly editions it’s offered since way back in 2012. SmartSource will once again take a mid-July break, a trend it began several years ago. But it won’t take the Sunday closest to Independence Day off as it typically does.

In contrast, RetailMeNot Everyday, which was rebranded earlier this year, is backtracking a bit. It plans publications on 38 Sundays in 2019, down from 41 in 2018. While all of the insert providers take the weeks of Presidents’ Day, Easter, Labor Day and Christmas off, RetailMeNot Everyday will take additional non-holiday breaks in March, June, September and October. But it will add an insert to what was once a dark week in August, which will make August the only month out of the year in which RetailMeNot Everyday will publish each and every Sunday.

As for P&G, its publication schedule often throws those guesstimated schedules for a loop, since brandSAVERs typically show up either at the very end of the month, at the very beginning, sometimes both and sometimes neither. In 2019, P&G inserts will consistently show up on the last Sunday of each month, except in June. That edition will instead appear at the beginning of July, so June will have no brandSAVERs and July will have two.

And what about double or even triple editions? That’s an area where guesstimated schedules’ guesses are as good as anyone’s. “As a matter of policy”, Valassis annually declines to share any details about when it’s planning multiple editions of RetailMeNot Everyday on any given date. And this year, News America similarly declined to cooperate. Could it be because they don’t want to ruin the surprise? They don’t want to tip their hand to their competitor? They worry that coupon insert diverters and sellers might be advantaged in some way by knowing in advance when they can get their hands on the biggest coupon insert hauls? Or they’re just not all that interested in the free publicity for their publications that these popular annual insert schedules provide?

Whatever the reason, the result is that this schedule doesn’t attempt to specify when and whether we’ll get more than one SmartSource or RetailMeNot Everyday. You can guess, “based on past trends” – or just be pleasantly surprised a little closer to each date, as we learn for sure exactly how many inserts we can expect.

In the meantime, go ahead and take a look at the exclusive, accurate and official 2019 Sunday coupon insert schedule below – or you can click here to download and print a copy to keep in your coupon binder. And be sure to visit each week throughout the year, for previews of what coupons you can expect to receive each Sunday!

2019 Coupon Insert Schedule