When Is Easter?

Why does Easter move every year?

Easter Sunday is defined as the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon, which is the first ecclesiastical full moon falling on or after March 21 (the Church's fixed date for the spring equinox). Because lunar months last about 29.5 days and do not line up evenly with our 12 calendar months, the date of that full moon shifts from year to year, and Easter shifts along with it.

This is also why Easter is always in March or April: the earliest possible date is March 22 (an extremely rare occurrence) and the latest is April 25. For the full rule, worked example, and the history behind it, see how the date of Easter is determined.

How this calculator works

The calculator above runs a well-known, public calendar formula (the Anonymous Gregorian algorithm, sometimes called the Meeus/Jones/Butcher algorithm, for the Western date; the Meeus Julian algorithm for the Orthodox date) entirely in your browser. No year you type is ever sent to a server: the result appears instantly because it is calculated on your own device.

Before publishing this page, the formula's output for 2024 through 2029 was checked against dates published by an independent reference source and matched exactly, including the two coincidence years (2025 and 2028) when the Western and Orthodox dates fall on the same Sunday. The next upcoming Easter shown at the top updates automatically based on today's date: if this year's Easter has already passed, it shows next year's date instead.

Western vs. Orthodox Easter

Most Western churches (Catholic and Protestant) calculate Easter using the Gregorian calendar. Many Eastern Orthodox churches still use the older Julian calendar for this calculation, which usually places their Easter one to five weeks later than the Western date, though the two occasionally coincide, as they did in 2025 and will again in 2028. The calculator above shows both dates side by side for any year you check.

Both traditions apply the exact same underlying rule (first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon following the spring equinox); the difference comes entirely from which calendar, Gregorian or Julian, is used to carry out that calculation. See how the date of Easter is determined for the full explanation of both methods.

Quick facts about Easter's date

A few numbers that put any given year's date in context, based on the ecclesiastical rules used since the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582:

• Easter is always a Sunday, between March 22 and April 25 (Western/Gregorian calendar).
• The most common Easter dates are March 31 and April 16.
• The rarest Easter dates are March 22 and March 23.
• Ash Wednesday and the 40 days of Lent (not counting Sundays) always lead up to Easter Sunday.
• See the full year-by-year Easter date table for 2020 through 2040.

A short history of how Easter's date was standardized

For the first few centuries of Christianity, different regions calculated Easter's date differently, sometimes landing on different Sundays in the same year. The First Council of Nicaea, convened in 325 CE, set out to fix that by establishing a single rule the entire Christian world would follow: Easter Sunday would be the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. Rather than leaving each region to observe the sky and decide for itself, the Council had tables constructed so the date could be worked out years in advance, the same approach this page's calculator still uses today, just automated instead of hand-calculated.

Those tables were refined several times over the following centuries. The most influential early version came from the 6th-century monk Dionysius Exiguus, and a further reform arrived in 1582 under Pope Gregory XIII, whose new calendar (the Gregorian calendar, still used worldwide for civil dates today) corrected a small but accumulating drift in the older Julian calendar's leap-year rule. Western churches adopted the new Gregorian tables; many Eastern Orthodox churches kept using the older Julian-calendar tables, which is the direct reason the two traditions can land on different Sundays in the same year.

Easter around the Christian calendar

Easter Sunday does not stand alone: it sits at the center of a much longer stretch of the Christian calendar, running from Ash Wednesday at the start of Lent through to Pentecost seven weeks after Easter itself. Different Christian traditions mark this period with different customs, but the underlying dates, once Easter's own date is known for a given year, follow the same fixed offsets everywhere: the same number of days before or after Easter Sunday, year after year, regardless of which specific date Easter happens to fall on.

This is also why Easter is sometimes called a "movable feast" rather than simply an event with a variable date: the entire cluster of related observances, Lent, Holy Week, Easter itself, and the weeks leading to Pentecost, moves together as a block each year, anchored to Easter Sunday's own shifting position between March 22 and April 25.

Why Easter's date is so often searched incorrectly

Search data for this topic shows an unusually large number of misspellings and typing slips, "whens easter," "when is easter this yr," "when's easter," and dozens of similar variations, alongside the correctly spelled query. That pattern makes sense given how the question actually gets asked out loud: it is a quick, often last-minute check (planning travel, a family gathering, or a school break), typed in a hurry on a phone keyboard rather than carefully composed. Whichever way it is phrased or spelled, the underlying question is the same one this page answers directly: the next upcoming Easter Sunday, calculated fresh every time the page loads rather than pulled from a page that was last updated months or years ago.

The same applies to voice assistants: a spoken query like "OK Google, when is Easter this year" or "Hey Google, what day is Easter on" is answered by the same underlying date, whether typed, spoken, or misspelled.

Easter and other movable feast days

Several other dates on the Christian calendar are defined relative to Easter Sunday rather than fixed on their own, so once you know Easter's date for a given year, you can find all of them without a separate lookup:

• Ash Wednesday: 46 calendar days before Easter Sunday (40 days of Lent, not counting the six Sundays in between).
• Palm Sunday: the Sunday immediately before Easter Sunday.
• Good Friday: the Friday immediately before Easter Sunday, marking the crucifixion in the Christian tradition.
• Easter Monday: the day after Easter Sunday, observed as a public holiday in many countries.
• Ascension Day: 39 days after Easter Sunday (the 40th day counting Easter Sunday itself as day one), always a Thursday.
• Pentecost (Whit Sunday): 49 days after Easter Sunday, always a Sunday.