This story is part of Amazon Prime Day, CNET's guide to everything you need to know and how to find the best deals.

As the official start of summer approaches in the northern hemisphere, there's only one thing on the mind of avid deal hunters: Amazon Prime Day. As one of the biggest shopping events of the year, it represents a great opportunity to score some savings on items you've been eyeing over the last few months, with Black Friday-level pricing available across a variety of products. But when exactly is Amazon Prime Day in 2022? No need to speculate, the answers are here.

Amazon Prime Day 2022 date

This year, Prime Day will start on July 12 and run through July 13. The Prime Day announcement comes from Amazon much earlier than it has in previous years to confirm the dates, but that's partially because you'll be able to take advantage of early Prime Day deals starting on June 21.

Previous Amazon Prime Day dates

Since Amazon launched its inaugural Prime Day sale way back in 2015, the company has (mostly) scheduled the event around the same time of year. In fact, outside of the last two years when the dates were shifted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon has usually kicked off the sale somewhere around the middle two weeks of July. 

Here are all of the previous Amazon Prime Day dates:

• Prime Day 2015: July 15
• Prime Day 2016: July 12
• Prime Day 2017: July 11 to 12
• Prime Day 2018: July 16 to 17
• Prime Day 2019: July 15 to 16
• Prime Day 2020: Oct. 13 to 14
• Prime Day 2021: June 21 to 22

As you can see, Prime Day was pretty much locked into an early- to mid-July schedule for its first five years before uncertainty around the pandemic in 2020 caused the company to push the sale back to the fall that year. Then last year, Amazon was quick to bring it forward in the calendar once again, kicking off the event in June 2021. 

With a return to July in 2022, Amazon hopes that this year's event will be its biggest and best yet.