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Countdown

Time until April Fools' Day

1 April, so you have time to plan or to brace.

Counting down to April Fools' Day

Thursday, 1 April 2027
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Midnight at the start of Thursday, 1 April 2027

Counting from your device clock.

What is April Fools' Day?

April Fools' Day is 1 April, a day for hoaxes with a history running back at least to the sixteenth century and no clear single origin. A common convention in Britain is that pranks are only fair before noon. It is a normal working day everywhere, which is exactly why so much of the day happens at work and online. The countdown targets midnight at the start of 1 April in your own zone, which gives you the morning window in full.

Anyone planning something has a short window and a sceptical audience, since most people now expect the day. Newspapers and brands have run spoof stories since at least the middle of the twentieth century, and the convention that a hoax should be revealed and should be harmless is what separates it from a lie. The date causes real difficulty for people who need to publish genuine news on 1 April: product launches, funding announcements and research results released that morning are routinely disbelieved, and some organisations deliberately move them. In France and Italy the custom involves sticking a paper fish on someone's back rather than telling a story. It is a working day everywhere, so when the 1st falls at a weekend the office version tends to migrate to the Monday.

Scotland once spread the custom over two days, giving the second to pranks played on a person's back, which is where the paper tail belongs. Spanish-speaking countries keep their hoaxing day on 28 December, the feast of the Holy Innocents, so a joke made there on the first of April lands on nothing. Iran's Sizdah Bedar falls on the thirteenth day after Nowruz, close to the same date, and carries a tradition of lies of its own. The assumption that trips people up is that the day is shared worldwide: a spoof announcement issued to every market will be read straight in half of them.

The next one falls on Thursday, 1 April 2027, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

Where the custom might have come from

No origin is settled. The most repeated story is that France's Edict of Roussillon in 1564 fixed the year's start at 1 January and that people who kept the old spring date were mocked for it, but the custom appears elsewhere both before and after, and the edict was not applied uniformly. A Flemish poem of 1561 sends a servant on a string of fool's errands on a day it names as the first of April, which is older than the French explanation it is supposed to illustrate. A line in Chaucer is sometimes offered and almost certainly refers to something else.

Broadcast hoaxes are a twentieth-century layer on top. The BBC's Panorama filmed a Swiss spaghetti harvest in 1957 and had viewers ringing in to ask how to grow their own. Newspapers, magazines and later software companies took up the form, and for a period in the 2000s a technology firm that published nothing on the day looked as though it had missed something. The convention that separates a hoax from a lie is that it is revealed and that nobody is out of pocket afterwards.

Frequently asked questions

How is this countdown calculated?

The target is midnight at the start of Thursday, 1 April 2027, read in your device's own time zone. The date is always 1 April, so the page sets it against the year you are in and rolls to the next one as soon as it goes by.

Do the pranks stop at noon?

By the British convention, yes: a hoax told after midday is held to rebound on whoever tells it. The rule is not kept everywhere and has little grip online, where a story posted in the morning keeps circulating all day. This countdown runs to midnight at the start of 1 April, so the whole of that morning window sits inside it. The conventions that do travel are that a hoax should be revealed and should be harmless.

Why do companies avoid announcing real news on the day?

Because the audience discounts it. A funding round, a product launch or a research result published on the morning of the 1st is read as a joke, picked up late or not at all, and a correction rarely catches up with the original impression. Newsrooms are more sceptical than usual that day and will hold a story rather than risk being taken in. Press offices generally move anything genuine to the 31st or the 2nd, and the few that publish on the day tend to add an explicit line saying that it is not a hoax.

Has a hoax ever caused real trouble?

Occasionally. The BBC reported in 1980 that the face of Big Ben was to be replaced with a digital display and took calls from people objecting. Burger King advertised a left-handed hamburger in 1998 and had customers ordering it, and asking for the right-handed version. The pattern is always the same: a hoax plausible enough to act on stops being funny at the moment somebody makes a decision on it, which is why the reveal is the part of the custom that matters.