When Is Mother's Day? Date by Country and Year

There is no single Mother's Day. Every country picks its own rule, and the rules fall into four families. Knowing the family tells you how the date behaves from year to year, and that is how this tool computes each one instead of storing a list of dates.

• An nth Sunday of a month. The US, Canada, Australia, Japan, Germany and about two dozen others use the second Sunday of May, which always falls between May 8 and May 14. Spain, Portugal and Hungary use the first Sunday of May (May 1 to 7), Sweden and the Dominican Republic the last Sunday of May (May 25 to 31), Norway the second Sunday of February, Argentina the third Sunday of October and Luxembourg the second Sunday of June.
• A fixed date. Mexico celebrates on May 10 and Poland on May 26 whatever the weekday, so in some years it falls midweek. Egypt and the UAE use March 21, Thailand August 12 (Queen Sirikit's birthday) and Indonesia December 22. South Korea's May 8 is Parents' Day, shared with fathers.
• An Easter-based date. UK and Irish Mothering Sunday is the fourth Sunday of Lent, three weeks before Easter Sunday. Easter is found with the Anonymous Gregorian algorithm (Meeus/Jones/Butcher), which is why the date can fall anywhere from March 1 to April 4.
• A rule with an exception. France uses the last Sunday of May, but moves to the first Sunday of June when that Sunday is Pentecost, 49 days after Easter.

Russia sits in a family of its own: the last Sunday of November. Because the rules are exact, you can read any year from 2000 to 2100, including years nobody has published a calendar for yet.

Anna Jarvis organized the first Mother's Day service in Grafton, West Virginia, in May 1908, and campaigned for a national day. In 1914 Congress passed a joint resolution and President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation setting the second Sunday of May, the rule the US still uses. Many countries then adopted the same date, which is why the second Sunday of May is the most common rule on the list.

Other countries kept older traditions. Mothering Sunday long predates the American holiday and follows the church year, so its date comes from the calculation of Easter. Mexico's May 10 dates from the early 1920s, Egypt's March 21 was popularized in 1956 by the journalist Mustafa Amin, and Indonesia's December 22 marks the 1928 Indonesian Women's Congress.

Method. Weekday and nth-weekday math runs on plain year, month and day values, not on local clock times, so it is the same in every time zone. Easter is the Anonymous Gregorian algorithm published by Meeus, Jones and Butcher, and agrees with published Easter tables (April 5 in 2026, March 28 in 2027). Pentecost is Easter plus 49 days. The tool also reuses the same date helpers as the US federal holidays calendar. If you are planning an annual reminder around the date, the anniversary calculator works well for the other family dates.