Animal Crossing: New Horizons Turnip Prices Guide: When to Sell

Turnips are the closest thing New Horizons has to a stock market, and playing it right is the fastest honest way to get rich. Every Sunday a little boar named Daisy Mae shows up selling turnips by the bunch. For the next six days, Timmy and Tommy buy them back at a rate that shifts twice a day, anywhere from pocket change up to 660 bells a turnip. Buy low, cash out high, and clear your pockets before 5 AM the following Sunday, because that's the exact second the whole crop rots.

The good news is those prices aren't random. The week quietly follows one of four patterns, and once you can read them, the whole thing gets way less stressful.

Buying Turnips on Sunday

Finding Daisy Mae

Once Nook's Cranny is open for business, Daisy Mae visits your island every Sunday from 5 AM until noon. No event bumps her, no holiday pushes her around - she's out there rain or shine. Miss the noon cutoff and she's gone for a full week, so the Sunday window is the one appointment the game actually keeps for you.

She inherited the job from her grandma Joan, who ran the same racket in the older Animal Crossing games. Cute bit of trivia, not useful, but it explains the family smell of turnips.

What Turnips Cost

Daisy Mae charges somewhere between 90 and 110 bells per turnip, and she only sells in batches of ten. The price holds for her whole visit, so there's no point hovering until 11:50 hoping for a markdown. The number you see at 5 AM is the number.

That price matters more than it looks. Every offer the twins quote later in the week is a percent of what you paid her. Pay 90 bells and a "200%" week hands you 180 a turnip. Pay 110 and the exact same week pays 220. A cheap Sunday quietly makes every later number better.

How Big Should Your Buy Be?

So how much should you actually buy? For a first run, keep it small - ten or twenty batches, which runs 9,000 to 22,000 bells at normal prices. That's enough to feel the swings without crying over a rotten dud of a week.

There's no purchase cap in New Horizons. The older games stopped you at 990 turnips, but here you're limited by two things only: the bells in your wallet and the pocket slots you can spare. Once checking the board twice a day is a habit, scale up. A serious week might be 2,000 turnips (roughly 200,000 bells at 100 each), which sounds scary until a hot Tuesday pays it back five times over.

How Daily Prices Change

Two Prices a Day

From Monday through Saturday, Nook's Cranny offers one turnip price in the morning and a fresh one in the afternoon. The morning rate runs from the 8 AM open until 11:59 AM. The second rate kicks in at noon and holds until the shop closes at 10 PM. That's twelve separate prices across the week, and any one of them can be the peak.

Checking costs nothing. Talk to Timmy and Tommy, pick the sell option, and they'll quote the current rate - you can back right out without handing over a single turnip. Guessing is a choice you're making at that point.

You can also sell in pieces. When you agree to sell, you pick how many batches go, so nothing forces an all-or-nothing dump. Sell two stacks on a decent bump and keep the rest riding for a possible spike - that hedge saves a lot of regret on weeks where you can't tell what's going on.

Every Price Is a Percent of Sunday's Cost

This is the mental trick that makes the whole market click. The board isn't showing random bells, it's showing a percentage of whatever Daisy Mae charged you. 150 on the board after a 100-bell Sunday is 150%. That same 150 after a 90-bell Sunday is a bigger deal, percentage-wise, than it looks.

It also explains the famous ceiling. The biggest number the shop will ever pay is 660 bells, and that's simply 600% of a 110-bell buy. When someone posts a 600+ board online, that's a large spike week doing its thing at full volume.

Make Checking a Habit

Twice a day, every day, about thirty seconds each time. Keep a running note in your phone: Sunday cost, then each morning and afternoon number as you see it. Those logged numbers are what let you spot the week's pattern early enough to act on it, either by eyeball or with a predictor site (more on that below). Prices you didn't write down are prices you can't use.

Tracking Price Patterns

The Four Weekly Patterns

The week's prices follow one of four patterns, and the game picks it the moment the week starts. These came straight out of the game's code, so they're dead reliable. The catch is nobody tells you which one you got - you have to figure it out from the prices as they land.

| Pattern | How the week plays out | Top price you'll see | |---|---|---| | Decreasing | Opens Monday morning at 85-90% of your cost and slides all week | Under your buy price | | Small spike | Dips low (often 40-90% of cost), then one jump; peak lands exactly three periods after the rise starts | 140-200% of cost | | Large spike | Acts like a decreasing week, then a short huge surge | 200-600% of cost | | Random | Wobbles up and down with two or three small bumps | Never above 140% of cost |

Reading the Tells

A few rules of thumb go a long way here.

A really ugly Monday morning - way under 85% of what you paid - points at the small spike pattern, since that one can open as low as 40%. Decreasing and large spike weeks both open in that 85-90% range, so a mild Monday tells you almost nothing on its own.

The first real rise after a falling stretch is the big signal. A jump means you're in a spike week, and now it's countdown math. In a large spike, the surge starts somewhere between Monday afternoon at the earliest and Thursday afternoon at the latest, and the peak lands two periods after the start - so Thursday afternoon through Friday afternoon. If Thursday afternoon's price is still dropping, the big surge isn't coming this week.

Small spike timing works the same way but slower. The peak shows up exactly three periods after that first rise. A rise reported Tuesday afternoon puts the peak on Thursday morning, for example. One trap worth knowing: the small spike pattern sometimes dips a little in the first or second period after the rise starts. Don't panic and dump at the first wobble - count the periods and give the pattern room to finish.

Bumps that stay under 140% of your cost are the random pattern saying hello. You're guaranteed at least two of those bumps in a random week, so an early small peak is no reason to panic-sell.

Last Week Predicts This Week

The dice are quietly loaded. Your odds of each pattern depend on what last week was, which is a nice little edge for planning Sunday buys:

| Last week's pattern | Large spike | Small spike | Decreasing | Random | |---|---|---|---|---| | Large spike | 5% | 25% | 20% | 50% | | Small spike | 25% | 15% | 15% | 45% | | Decreasing | 45% | 25% | 5% | 25% | | Random | 30% | 35% | 15% | 20% |

The headline: right after a garbage decreasing week, you've got a 45% shot at a large spike - the best odds in the game. Buy heavy then. Right after a huge payout, buy light, because a repeat large spike only shows up 5% of the time and half of those weeks fall back to random.

Let Turnip Prophet Do the Math

You don't have to do this in your head. Turnip Prophet (turnipprophet.io) is a free site where you punch in your Sunday price and every price since, and it spits out the odds of each pattern plus projected price ranges for the rest of the week. It runs the actual game algorithm, so once it has three or four periods logged, it gets sharp. By Wednesday it usually knows your week better than you do.

The input is just a grid of slots - Monday morning, Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning, and so on through Saturday. Fill in what you saw, leave the rest blank, and the odds update each time. If the phone-note habit from earlier sounded like homework, this is the payoff: those scribbled numbers become a live forecast, and the forecast tells you whether to hold, sell, or start hunting other islands.

When to Sell or Visit Another Island

Simple Sell Rules

Anything above your Sunday cost is profit, and green is green. That said, a few guidelines keep you from leaving money on the table:

• Above 140% of cost means you're in a spike. Random weeks can't get there, so a number past that line is either small spike or large spike, and those windows are short. Decide fast.
• In a large spike, big numbers pass quickly. Peaks run 200-600% of cost (400-600+ bells on a normal buy), and the crash afterward is fast and ugly. Something in the 400s is a perfectly fine cash-out. Holding out for 660 is how people watch a 500 board turn into a 90 one.
• Random weeks, take the bump. Anything around 130-140% of cost is a solid, safe offload for that pattern.
• Saturday afternoon is your last real chance. The shop's closed by Sunday morning anyway. If Saturday's price clears your cost at all, selling beats hoping.

So when do you pull the trigger? A workable answer: sell the moment a price feels like a good week rather than a great one, unless the tells say a spike is still building. Greed is the only thing that ever rots a big profit.

A Worked Example

Say you bought 2,000 turnips at 95 bells. That's 190,000 bells out of pocket. Tuesday afternoon the board reads 475 - which is 500% of 95, right in large spike territory. Sell the whole stash and you walk out with 950,000 bells, a profit of 760,000. Total effort for the week: a Sunday purchase plus about ten minutes of price checks.

Selling on Someone Else's Island

Every island rolls its own pattern each week. Yours can be in the gutter while a friend's is spiking, and that's where multiplayer saves the week. With a Nintendo Switch Online subscription you can fly to anyone's island and sell your stash at their Nook's Cranny. It works with local play too, and it even works when their clock and calendar don't match yours, so overseas friends are still an option at 2 AM your time.

No friends with a hot board? Stranger islands work. Sites like turnip.exchange and subreddits like r/acturnips post dodo codes with the current price, and you queue up for a visit. Hosts set their own rules - a tip or an entry fee is standard, and during a 500+ board the line gets long, so pack your turnips before you grab the code.

This is also the only real escape hatch on a decreasing week. Your own island never recovers that week, so if you bought heavy and Monday's already sliding, start scouting other boards early.

Avoiding Spoiled Turnips

The Sunday 5 AM Deadline

Every unsold turnip rots instantly at 5 AM on Sunday. Not at noon, not when the shop opens - 5 AM sharp, the whole stash, no grace period. And there's no undo button either; spoiled means spoiled for good, so the 100-bell trash price is the floor, not a negotiating start. Since Nook's Cranny closes at 10 PM Saturday, your true deadline is Saturday afternoon's price. Treat that window as final and you'll never take the big loss.

Time Travel Rules

Messing with the clock is where most spoilage actually comes from. The rules are strict:

• Any backwards jump rots them. Even one minute back, even inside the same week. Instant trash.
• Forward is fine within the current week. Jump ahead to Saturday to catch a price and your turnips are safe.
• Forward past the coming Sunday rots them too. You can't skip over the deadline and land in next week with this week's crop.
• Changing your console's date counts the same as in-game time travel. Turn off automatic clock sync on the Switch if other people in the house like fiddling with it.

One extra wrinkle: jumping backwards also rerolls your week's pattern. So there's no cheating a bad week by rewinding to Monday - you'd just be standing there with a pocket of trash and a brand new pattern.

What Rotten Turnips Are Still Good For

Spoiled turnips count as trash items in this game. The shop pays 100 bells apiece for them, they stop selling in batches of ten (each one goes through on its own), and the Happy Home Academy will dock your score if you keep a pile of them lying around the house.

There is one genuine upside. Drop a rotten turnip on the ground outside and it attracts ants, with flies showing up shortly after. Two easy Critterpedia and museum entries, basically handed to you off a losing week.

So here's the full losing-week play: sell whatever still clears your cost by Saturday afternoon, dump the rest at the shop for pocket change, and keep a single bulb out on the grass. The ants find it fast. It's the only interest a rotten turnip has ever paid.