How many days until Easter?
A live countdown to the next Easter Sunday. Easter moves, so this page does not store a date — it computes one, using the same computus the church uses, every time it loads.
Live countdown
How this date is worked out
Easter is the hardest date on this site, and the reason is that it is not a date at all but a rule. Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon that falls on or after 21 March. Follow that rule and Easter can land anywhere from 22 March to 25 April inclusive — a spread of 35 days.
Two subtleties do most of the damage to naive implementations. First, "ecclesiastical full moon" does not mean the astronomical one: the church uses a set of tables, based on the 19-year Metonic cycle, that approximate the lunar month without ever needing an observation or an ephemeris. The tabulated moon and the real moon can differ by a day or two. Second, "21 March" is a fixed ecclesiastical stand-in for the equinox, not the actual astronomical equinox, which drifts between 19 and 21 March.
This page implements the anonymous Gregorian computus — the compact algorithm published in the nineteenth century and popularised by Jean Meeus, sometimes called the Meeus/Jones/Butcher algorithm. It takes a year and returns a date using only integer arithmetic, valid for any year in the Gregorian calendar. That is why the table above can be generated on the fly rather than shipped as data, and why this page will still be right long after anyone has stopped maintaining it.
Verification. The implementation is checked against known values: 2024 gives 31 March, 2025 gives 20 April, 2026 gives 5 April, 2027 gives 28 March, 2030 gives 21 April and 2038 gives 25 April. The last time Easter fell on the earliest possible date, 22 March, was 1818, and it will not happen again until 2285. The latest possible date, 25 April, last occurred in 1943 and comes round next in 2038.
Why Orthodox Easter is usually different
Eastern Orthodox churches apply the same rule but on the Julian calendar, and use a different set of lunar tables. Because the Julian calendar now runs 13 days behind the Gregorian one, Orthodox Easter usually falls later — sometimes by a week, sometimes by four or five. The two coincide only occasionally. This page computes the Western, Gregorian date.
There is no shortage of proposals to fix Easter to a set Sunday, and the United Kingdom even legislated for one in the Easter Act 1928, which would place it on the Sunday after the second Saturday in April. It has never been brought into force.
The dates that move with Easter
Easter anchors a whole sequence of movable feasts. Once you know the date, all of these follow from simple offsets, and you can calculate any of them with the date calculator:
| Observance | Offset from Easter Sunday |
|---|---|
| Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day, Mardi Gras) | 47 days before |
| Ash Wednesday, start of Lent | 46 days before |
| Palm Sunday | 7 days before |
| Maundy Thursday | 3 days before |
| Good Friday | 2 days before |
| Easter Monday | 1 day after |
| Ascension Day | 39 days after |
| Pentecost (Whit Sunday) | 49 days after |
Lent is described as forty days because the six Sundays within it are not counted as fast days, which is why the arithmetic from Ash Wednesday comes to 46.
Why the moving date matters practically
In the United Kingdom, Good Friday and Easter Monday are public holidays, and the school Easter break moves with them — which is why some years produce a long March holiday and others an April one. Airlines and hotels price accordingly, and a late Easter can push the spring break into the same fortnight as other national holidays. If you are planning more than a year ahead, check the table rather than assuming Easter is "around the start of April".
The next six Easter Sundays
Each row below is calculated in your browser by running the computus for that year. Nothing here is a lookup table:
| Year | Date | Day of the week | Days from today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calculating… | |||
Questions people ask
Why does Easter move every year?
Because it is defined against the moon rather than the sun. Easter is the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after 21 March, so it tracks a lunar cycle of about 29.5 days laid over a solar calendar. The result can fall anywhere between 22 March and 25 April.
How is the date calculated here?
With the anonymous Gregorian computus, run in your browser for whichever year is needed. Nothing is hardcoded and no list of dates is stored, so the countdown and the table are correct for any year you might visit in.
Is this Orthodox Easter?
No, this is the Western Gregorian date. Orthodox churches apply the same rule using the Julian calendar and different lunar tables, which usually puts their Easter later. The two occasionally coincide.
When is Good Friday?
Always two days before Easter Sunday, so subtract two from the date shown above. The table of offsets in the section above covers the other movable feasts, and the date calculator will do the arithmetic for you.
What are the earliest and latest possible Easters?
22 March and 25 April. The earliest last occurred in 1818 and is next due in 2285; the latest last occurred in 1943 and returns in 2038. Both are rare because they require the ecclesiastical full moon to land exactly at the edges of the window.
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.