How many days until April Fools' Day?
A live countdown to the next 1 April. Plenty of notice to plan something, and — in Britain and Ireland at least — a firm deadline of noon to deploy it.
Live countdown
How this date is worked out
1 April, fixed, resolved as the next occurrence on or after today. The page rolls forward on its own on 2 April. No year is written anywhere in the source, so this countdown is not itself an elaborate long-term prank on future readers.
Where the day came from
Nobody knows for certain, which is oddly appropriate. The most repeated theory concerns calendar reform: when France adopted the Gregorian calendar in the sixteenth century, New Year celebrations that had clustered around the end of March moved to 1 January, and those who kept to the old date were mocked as fools. It is a tidy story with a real weakness — the timing of the various reforms across Europe does not line up neatly with the spread of the custom, and different countries changed their new year at very different times.
Other candidates are older. Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, written around 1392, contains a date reference that some readers take as a pun on the last day of March, though the manuscript is ambiguous. The Roman festival of Hilaria in late March involved masquerade and mockery, and medieval Europe had its Feast of Fools. A Flemish poem of 1561 describes a nobleman sending a servant on absurd errands on 1 April, which is the earliest clear description of the practice we would recognise.
The rules, such as they are
- The noon rule. In Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, tradition holds that pranks must stop at midday. Play one in the afternoon and the fool is you.
- Poisson d'avril. In France, Italy and French-speaking Belgium the classic prank is to stick a paper fish on someone's back. Children have been doing it for centuries, and French media still run fish-themed hoaxes.
- Media hoaxes. A twentieth-century addition, and now the dominant form. The BBC's 1957 report on the Swiss spaghetti harvest, complete with footage of pasta being picked from trees, remains the benchmark; Taco Bell's 1996 announcement that it had bought the Liberty Bell and renamed it the Taco Liberty Bell, and Burger King's 1998 left-handed Whopper, are the best-known corporate examples.
- Corporate fatigue. Enthusiasm among large companies has cooled noticeably. A prank that lands badly, or that is mistaken for a real product announcement, generates the wrong sort of coverage — and 1 April is now a genuinely difficult day to publish real news.
Adjacent dates
Elsewhere in the calendar, Spain and much of Latin America keep their prank day on 28 December, the Day of the Holy Innocents. Iran has Sizdah Bedar on the thirteenth day of Nowruz, in early April, which involves practical jokes among much else and is considerably older than any European equivalent.
The next six April Fools' Days
Computed from the rule rather than stored, so this table is generated fresh each time you load the page:
| Year | Date | Day of the week | Days from today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calculating… | |||
Questions people ask
Is April Fools' Day a public holiday?
No, nowhere. It is a custom rather than an observance, and 1 April is an ordinary working day.
Do pranks really have to stop at noon?
Traditionally yes in Britain, Ireland and much of the Commonwealth, where anyone playing a trick in the afternoon is themselves the April fool. The rule is not observed in the United States or in France.
Will this countdown be correct next year?
Yes. It is generated from the rule "the next 1 April on or after today" every time the page loads, so it never needs editing.
What if 1 April falls on a weekend?
Nothing changes about the date, but it does thin out the workplace pranks and tends to shift the day’s activity online. The table above shows which years those are.
Count down to something else
Every page below works the same way and stays correct on its own. For a date of your own — a holiday, an exam, a due date, a launch — use the countdown and date difference calculator.