Days Until Easter

Easter is the calendar's great moving target: the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the March equinox, which lets it land anywhere from 22 March to 25 April. This page computes the date with the standard Gregorian church algorithm — the same one that yields 5 April 2026 and 28 March 2027 — and counts down live.

Everything else in the Easter season hangs off that Sunday: Good Friday is two days before, Ash Wednesday is 46 days before, and Pentecost is 49 days after. Get the Sunday right and the whole season falls into place — the five-year table below has it.

Easter is the reason the Western calendar contains a movable feast at all. The date is set by a formula agreed at the Council of Nicaea in 325: the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after 21 March. The word 'ecclesiastical' is doing real work — the church uses a tabulated lunar cycle rather than astronomical observation, so the computed full moon can differ from the visible one by a day or two, and the resulting date can differ from a naive astronomical calculation.

The range is wide: Easter can fall anywhere from 22 March to 25 April, a span of thirty-five days, and it drags an entire season with it. Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, the forty days of Lent, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Ascension and Pentecost are all fixed relative to Easter, so a late Easter moves school holidays across much of Europe and shifts a quarter's trading in several retail sectors.

Orthodox churches use the same rule against the Julian calendar, so Orthodox Easter usually falls later — sometimes by a week, sometimes by more than a month — and coincides with Western Easter only occasionally. Proposals to fix Easter to a set Sunday have been made repeatedly, including UK legislation passed in 1928 that was never brought into force, and none has been adopted.

Easter Sunday — the next five years