Time until Easter Sunday

Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the paschal full moon on or after 21 March, which puts it between 22 March and 25 April in the Gregorian calendar. The paschal moon comes from a fixed ecclesiastical table rather than from live astronomy, so the date can be calculated centuries ahead. This countdown uses the standard algorithm for the Gregorian date used by Western churches. Orthodox churches compute the same rule on the Julian calendar, which usually gives a later Sunday.

The moving date drags a large part of the calendar with it. School holidays in Britain, Ireland and much of Europe are built around it, so the spring break can sit in late March one year and in the middle of April the next, with flights and family accommodation priced accordingly. Employers in many countries give a four-day weekend from the Friday to the Monday, which makes it the longest common break between Christmas and the summer. Shops and transport run holiday timetables across the whole weekend, and in some countries the rules on what may open are stricter than they are at Christmas. Chocolate appears in shops from early January wherever the date lands. The gap between the Western and Orthodox dates is often one week, sometimes four or five, and in some years none at all.

In Greece the Orthodox date is the largest holiday of the year, with a midnight liturgy, candles carried home still lit and lamb on the Sunday. Seville and other Andalusian cities give the whole week to processions run by brotherhoods that rehearse for months. Poland keeps the Monday for dousing people with water. The part almost nobody knows is that Britain has legislated a fixed Easter: an Act passed in 1928 would put it on the Sunday after the second Saturday in April, and it sits on the statute book unused, waiting on an agreement between churches that has never come.

The next one falls on Sunday, 28 March 2027, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

Working out Easter is the oldest sustained computation in European history. The Council of Nicaea in 325 settled that it should fall on a Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, and left the arithmetic open, so rival tables kept Rome, Alexandria and the British Isles out of step for centuries. The Synod of Whitby in 664 was called partly to decide which table Northumbria would follow. The medieval schools that taught the calculation called it the computus, and a good deal of early European arithmetic teaching came out of it.

The gap between the Western and Eastern dates is not a disagreement about the rule but about the calendar the rule is applied to. Orthodox churches run the calculation on the Julian calendar, which places the notional equinox thirteen days after the real one, and they use an older lunar table as well. The two Easters coincide in some years, fall a week apart in others and can be five weeks apart. Attempts to agree a common date have been made repeatedly since the 1960s and none has been adopted.