Every autumn the fireworks appear in the supermarket aisle somewhere near the Halloween sweets, and every autumn somebody asks us whether they are any good. Here is the version we actually believe, which you should weigh against the fact that we sell fireworks for a living.
You can spend £50 at Aldi or £50 with us. Nobody is asking you to spend more. The question is what the £50 buys, and the honest way to answer that is not the number on the front of the box.
Supermarket fireworks 2026 at a glance
| Retailer | What they stock | 2025 price band | Category | NEC published? | On sale | Buy online? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tesco | Sparklers, small selection boxes, one or two larger display packs | £1.49 to £120 | F2 garden, 1.4G | Not on the listings we checked | Mid to late October | Some lines via Tesco Marketplace |
| Aldi | Sparklers and single-ignition boxes, sold as a Specialbuy | 99p to £49.99 | F2 garden, 1.4G | Not on the listings we checked | Around 1 November | No, in store only |
| Lidl | Sparklers, selection boxes, one bigger multi-shot | £1.99 to £59.99 | F2 garden, 1.4G | Not on the listings we checked | Late October | No, in store only |
| Asda | Branded single-ignition boxes and rocket packs through George | £10 to £239 | F2 garden, 1.4G | Not on the listings we checked | Mid to late October | Yes, via George |
| Morrisons | Sparklers, fountains, small boxes, one large display pack | £2 to £135 | F2 garden, 1.4G | Not on the listings we checked | Around 30 October | No, in store only |
| Galactic Fireworks | Selection boxes, cakes and barrages, compounds, rockets, sparklers | 89p to £2,699 | F2 and F3, 1.3G and 1.4G | Yes, on every product page | All year, licensed | Yes, delivered on our own vans |
Supermarket prices are what these retailers listed during the 2025 season, taken from retailer listings and press round-ups published in October and November 2025. Galactic prices and specifications are live from our own catalogue as of 01/09/2026. Supermarkets confirm new ranges in September or October, so treat 2025 as a guide to the bands rather than a promise about 2026.
What supermarkets are genuinely good for
Convenience. You are in there anyway, the fireworks are twenty feet from the milk, and you can be home with a box in the boot without planning anything. That is a real advantage and for some people it is the only one that matters.
That is the whole list. We are not going to pad it out to three items to look even-handed.
More shots does not mean better
Start here, because it saves you money whoever you buy from.
Shot count tells you how many tubes are in the box. It tells you nothing about how big each break is, how high it goes, or how long the thing runs. A 138-shot box and a 40-shot cake are not ranked by that number, they are different products for different tastes. Some people want a lot of small breaks going up fast. Some want fewer, bigger ones with room to breathe between them. Neither is better and neither ever has been.
What does not vary with taste is how much firework you got for your money. That is net explosive content, or NEC: the weight in grams of the pyrotechnic composition inside. Duration and calibre fill in the rest of the picture. Those three are the numbers to ask for.
Supermarket listings lead on piece count and shot count. We could not find NEC published on any supermarket listing we checked. That is the actual problem with buying fireworks in a supermarket, and it is not that the number is bad. It is that there is no number.
Why the range is built the way it is
Supermarkets buy fireworks the way they buy everything: to a price. The buyer has a slot to fill at £6.99 and another at £49.99, and the product is whatever a factory can supply into that slot with a box on the front that looks like the money. Quality is not the brief. Landing on the price point is the brief.
Which is why the packaging does the talking. Twelve pieces sounds generous. A hundred and thirty-eight shots sounds enormous. Both are true and neither is informative.
The same money, side by side
Three spends, and at each one a product of the same shape: a single-ignition cake against a single-ignition cake, a multi-cake display pack against a multi-cake display pack. NEC is the headline column because it is the one that does not depend on taste.
| Spend | Shape | Supermarket, 2025 | Their NEC | Galactic, live today | Our NEC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £50 | Single-ignition cake | Aldi The Boss, £49.99, 138 shots | Not published | Gorilla, £49.99, 40 fanned shots, 60 seconds, F2, 1.3G | 480g |
| £100 | Multi-cake display pack | Tesco Power Force, £120, 8 pieces, 198 shots | Not published | The Lock Stock Pack, £90.00, 9 cakes, 435 seconds, F2 | 1,161g |
| £200 | Multi-cake display pack | No equivalent. Biggest 2025 pack was Morrisons Presidential, £135, 61 pieces | Not published | Legends of Olympus, £199.99, 9 cakes, 280 seconds, F3, 1.3G | 2,476g |
At £50
Aldi's biggest 2025 box, The Boss, was £49.99 and 138 shots. Our Gorilla is £49.99 and 40 shots, fanned across the sky, over a full 60 seconds, F2, 1.3G, 480g of composition.
Forty against a hundred and thirty-eight. If what you want is a fast wall of small breaks, The Boss might genuinely be the one you enjoy more, and we are not going to tell you your taste is wrong. What we can tell you is that Gorilla is 480g and runs for a minute, and that nobody will tell you what The Boss weighs.
At £100
Tesco's Power Force was the supermarket flagship in 2025: eight pieces, 198 shots, £120. The Lock Stock Pack is £90.00 for nine cakes, 1,161g, and 435 seconds of firing, which is seven and a quarter minutes. One more piece, thirty pounds less. And the duration is printed before you buy rather than discovered after.
If you would rather spend the full £120, the MI6 barrage pack is £119.99 for six cakes at 2,009g.
At £200
This is the interesting one, because there is nothing to compare it to.
The largest display pack any of the five sold in 2025 was Morrisons' Presidential at £135. Only Asda went higher, with a £239 Black Cat Kestrel rocket pack through George, and that is a rocket pack rather than a display. None of them sold a compound at any price.
So if you want a proper garden display, the supermarket option runs out somewhere around £135 and you have nowhere else to go in that aisle. For context, Legends of Olympus is £199.99 for nine cakes, 2,476g and about four and a half minutes, and it is nowhere near the top of what we stock.
Where we would not claim an advantage
At the very bottom. Our cheapest garden cakes run about 69g to 72g for £5.99, and a £6.99 supermarket cake is probably in similar territory. We cannot prove that either way, because their NEC is not published, but we are not going to pretend there is a meaningful gap between two small cakes at seven quid. Buy the convenient one.
The gap opens as the spend goes up, which is the opposite of how people usually assume it works.
The 1.3G gap, and why it is not a snub
There is one thing you will not find in a supermarket at any price. Supermarket ranges are 1.4G. Ours are both.
Be careful with what that means, because the common myth is that 1.3G is a professional grade. It is not. 1.3G and 1.4G are UN hazard types describing how a firework behaves in transport and storage, and they sit on a completely separate axis from the F1 to F4 categories that set your safety distance. A firework can be F2, the 8 metre garden rating, and 1.3G at the same time. Of the 384 cakes on our site today, 166 are 1.3G, and they are ordinary consumer fireworks that anyone over 18 can buy.
The difference is a storage threshold. 1.4G can be held in useful quantities without an explosives licence. Any quantity of 1.3G, however small, needs an explosives licence from the local authority. That threshold is the reason 1.3G is not on a supermarket shelf, and it is a licensing question rather than a judgement about the customer.
In practice, and this is our read as a retailer rather than something the regulations state, 1.3G is where you get proper power: more composition behind each shot and a harder break. At £25, penny for penny the same as Lidl's three-boxes-for-£25 deal, Phantom and Champion is two F2 garden cakes, 358g, 85 seconds, 1.3G.
Even for F2 garden fireworks
This is where most people assume the supermarket is fine. The logic goes: it is only a garden display, everything is F2 anyway, so a box is a box.
Gorilla, Phantom, Champion and the whole Lock Stock Pack are all F2, the 8 metre garden category, the same rating as the box in the trolley. Nobody in this comparison is being sold up to F3 except at the £200 mark, where the supermarket has no entry at all. The gap is not category. It is what went inside the tube at the factory, and that follows the price the buyer paid rather than the letter on the label.
F2 is a safety distance, not a quality grade. Two F2 cakes at the same price can be completely different products, and usually are. If you want the detail on where the category lines fall, there is a longer piece on the difference between F2 and F3.
Sparklers are the exception
Credit where it is due. A sparkler is close to a commodity, and Aldi's 99p for twelve 10 inch sparklers in 2025 worked out at about 8p each, which is the cheapest thing anywhere in this comparison and we cannot match it.
The rest of the field is tighter than you would think. Our 10 inch coloured sparklers are 89p for five, so about 18p each. Morrisons was £2 for ten, or 20p. Lidl was £1.99 for ten. Tesco was £1.49 for five 25cm sparklers, about 30p each, which is the most expensive option on the list. Buy sparklers wherever you like, but check the per-sparkler price rather than the pack price.
When do supermarkets sell fireworks?
The Fireworks Regulations 2004 let any retailer sell adult fireworks without a special licence during four windows: 15 October to 10 November, 26 to 31 December, the three days before Diwali and Diwali itself, and the three days before Chinese New Year and the day itself. Sell outside those windows and you need an all-year licence from your local authority.
That is exactly how the supermarket aisle behaves. It turns up in mid to late October and by the middle of November it has become a display of Christmas selection boxes. In 2025 Morrisons put its range out on 30 October and Aldi followed on 1 November, so the real selling period was closer to a fortnight than a month. Which matters if you are planning a wedding in June, or a birthday in March, or anything else in the ten months when the aisle is empty.
We hold an all-year licence, so our shop is open in the spring and the supermarket one is not.
Tesco fireworks 2026
Tesco usually runs the broadest supermarket range and is the one most likely to stock something bigger than a small box. In 2025 that meant giant hand-held sparklers at £1.49 for five, a twelve-piece Supernova selection box at £8 with a Clubcard deal of three for £20, and the eight-piece Power Force display pack at £120, or two for £185 with a Clubcard. Some lines also appear through Tesco Marketplace, its third-party seller platform, so you can sometimes find fireworks listed online after your local store has sold out.
Expect a similar shape in 2026: a sparkler line, a couple of boxes under £20, one headline pack over £100.
Aldi fireworks 2026
Aldi sells fireworks as a Specialbuy. They land on a set date, they are in store only, and when they are gone they are gone. In 2025 the range went out on 1 November, giving shoppers about five days before Bonfire Night.
The 2025 line-up started at 99p for twelve 10 inch sparklers and topped out at £49.99 for The Boss, with the Colour Cauldron at £6.99 and the Lightning Force at £39.99 in between. Shot counts were published. Nothing else was.
The other catch is availability: no online ordering, no click and collect, no restock once the pallet empties.
Lidl fireworks 2026
Lidl works much the same way: middle aisle, one delivery, no more after that. Its 2025 range leaned towards selection boxes rather than big single items, with giant sparklers at £1.99 for ten, a twelve-piece Energiser box at £9.99 or three for £25, a fourteen-piece Magnetism box at £16.99, and the Supercharged selection at £59.99 as the largest thing on the pallet. Three boxes for £25 is the deal people remember, and 36 pieces sounds like a lot until you notice that a piece can be a single small fountain.
Asda fireworks 2026
Asda is the odd one out, because it sells fireworks through George rather than the grocery side. Listings can go up online and stay up longer than the in-store window, and the range skews towards recognisable brand names rather than supermarket own-label, which does at least mean you can look the manufacturer up. In 2025 that included a 100-shot single-ignition Standard Witchcraft box at £75 and a Black Cat Kestrel pack of 36 rockets at £239, with multibuy offers alongside at two for £10, two for £40 and two for £100 on selected lines.
Stock and pricing vary a lot between stores. Check online before you drive over.
Morrisons fireworks 2026
Morrisons went out later than most in 2025, on 30 October, and kept everything in store. The range was mostly small: 16 inch sparklers at £2 for ten with three packs for £5, a twelve-piece Razzle Dazzle box at £6, a Sugar Skull fountain at £8. Above all that sat the Presidential display pack, 61 pieces at £135, which was the largest single item any of the five sold last season. If the plan is a few sparklers and one fountain for the kids on the way home, that is the convenience argument working exactly as intended.
Common questions
Are supermarket fireworks any good?
They are legal, they are the same F2 garden category sold everywhere else in the UK, and they carry the same UKCA or CE marking. The problem is that you cannot tell what you are buying. Supermarket ranges are bought to hit a price point and merchandised on the box, and the one specification that would let you compare them properly, NEC, is not published on any listing we checked. Spend the same money with a specialist and you get numbers you can check.
Does a higher shot count mean a better firework?
No, and it never has. Shot count is the number of tubes, not a measure of size or quality. A 40-shot cake can carry far more composition than a 138-shot one, or far less. Some people prefer many small breaks in quick succession and some prefer fewer, bigger ones, which is taste rather than quality. Compare NEC in grams, then duration, then calibre.
What does NEC mean and why does it matter?
Net explosive content: the weight in grams of pyrotechnic composition inside. It is the closest single number to how much firework you actually bought, and unlike shot count it does not change meaning depending on what you like. Two 100-shot cakes at 70g and 480g are not remotely the same product.
Are supermarket fireworks 1.3G or 1.4G?
1.4G. The hazard type governs storage rather than quality: 1.4G can be held in useful quantities without an explosives licence, while any quantity of 1.3G needs a local authority explosives licence. That threshold is why 1.3G does not appear on a supermarket shelf. It is not a quality grade and 1.3G is not professional-only: 166 of the 384 cakes on our site are 1.3G and every one is a consumer firework in the F2 or F3 category.
Do Aldi and Lidl sell fireworks all year round?
No. Both sell as a seasonal Specialbuy or middle-aisle line, in store only, for a short window around Bonfire Night, and once the pallet is empty it is not restocked. A retailer needs an all-year selling licence from its local authority to sell outside the four statutory windows, and the discounters do not run their fireworks that way.
Can you order supermarket fireworks online?
Mostly no. Aldi, Lidl and Morrisons kept fireworks in store only in 2025. Asda sells through George online, and some Tesco lines appear via Tesco Marketplace. If you want to order online and have them delivered on a date you choose, a specialist retailer is the simpler route.
What category are supermarket fireworks?
Almost always F2, the garden category, which needs an 8 metre safety distance. F3 needs 25 metres and is aimed at bigger sites. Category is printed on every firework sold in the UK, so check the box. Bear in mind that F2 is a safety distance rather than a quality grade: two F2 cakes at the same price can be very different products.
How old do you have to be to buy fireworks?
Eighteen for anything in category F2 or F3, and sixteen for most sparklers, although plenty of retailers apply eighteen across the board. Expect a Challenge 25 check at the till or on the doorstep. It is also an offence for under-18s to possess adult fireworks in a public place.
When should I buy for Bonfire Night 2026?
Late October, if you want any choice. Supermarket ranges sell through within days of landing, and the popular specialist lines go the same way in the first week of November. Buying for a specific date? Order the week before, not the day before.
Have a look at the range
Start with garden fireworks for F2 items, low noise fireworks if pets or neighbours are a factor, cheap fireworks for the under-£10 end, or Bonfire Night fireworks for the seasonal picks. Free standard delivery over £300, and everything goes out on our own vans rather than a parcel courier, with the detail on the delivery page. Or ring the shop in Dinnington and talk it through with someone, which is usually quicker than scrolling.
