Christmas is always on December 25, but Easter moves by weeks from one year to the next. In 2026 Western Easter is on April 5; in 2027 it is on March 28; in 2028 it falls on April 16. The reason is that Easter is tied to the moon and the spring equinox, not to a fixed calendar date.
The basic rule
Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon that falls on or after March 21.
That rule comes from early Christian tradition. The Gospels place the crucifixion and resurrection around the Jewish festival of Passover, which is set by the lunar calendar in spring. Early Christians wanted to celebrate the resurrection on a Sunday close to that time. The Council of Nicaea in AD 325 is traditionally credited with agreeing that all churches should celebrate on the same Sunday, and over the following centuries the method of calculating it was standardized.
The "ecclesiastical" moon and equinox
There is an important detail: churches do not use the astronomical full moon or the true equinox. Instead they use March 21 as a fixed equinox date and a set of tables that approximate the moon's phases, called the ecclesiastical full moon or paschal full moon. This means Easter can be calculated centuries in advance with simple arithmetic, and everyone using the same tables gets the same answer, even though the "church" full moon can differ from the real one by a day or two.
Why Easter falls between March 22 and April 25
- Earliest: if the paschal full moon falls on Saturday, March 21, Easter is the next day, March 22. This last happened in 1818 and will next happen in 2285.
- Latest: if the full moon falls on March 20, just before the cutoff, the next one is about 29.5 days later, on April 18. If April 18 is a Sunday, Easter is the following Sunday, April 25. This happened in 1943 and will next happen in 2038.
Why Orthodox Easter is often later
Eastern Orthodox churches use the same basic rule but calculate it with the older Julian calendar. The Julian calendar is now 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar, and its lunar tables differ slightly, so Orthodox Easter usually falls one to five weeks after Western Easter. Sometimes both coincide, as in 2025, when both were on April 20. In 2026, Western Easter is April 5 and Orthodox Easter is April 12.
The holidays that move with Easter
A whole season of observances is counted from Easter Sunday, so they all move with it:
| Day | Relation to Easter | 2026 date |
|---|---|---|
| Mardi Gras (Shrove Tuesday) | 47 days before | February 17 |
| Ash Wednesday (start of Lent) | 46 days before | February 18 |
| Palm Sunday | 7 days before | March 29 |
| Good Friday | 2 days before | April 3 |
| Easter Sunday | – | April 5 |
| Ascension Day | 39 days after | May 14 |
| Pentecost | 49 days after | May 24 |
Lent is described as 40 days, yet Ash Wednesday is 46 days before Easter. The difference is the six Sundays in Lent, which are traditionally not counted as fast days.
How the date is calculated
Mathematicians, including Carl Friedrich Gauss, devised formulas, known as computus, that turn the church rule into arithmetic. One popular version, sometimes called the anonymous Gregorian algorithm, uses a series of divisions and remainders based on the year number to find the month and day directly. This site uses that algorithm, which is why our Easter countdown works for any year.
Has anyone tried to fix Easter's date?
Yes. Proposals to set Easter on a fixed Sunday, such as the second Sunday in April, have been discussed for more than a century, and the United Kingdom even passed an Easter Act in 1928 that would fix the date, though it was never brought into force. Church leaders have also discussed agreeing a common date for Western and Orthodox Easter. So far, the traditional calculation remains.
Count down: see the live countdown to Easter, Good Friday, Palm Sunday or Ash Wednesday, with the dates for the next six years.