Easter Date Calculator

Easter is set by a lunar rule rather than a fixed calendar date. The rule traced to the Council of Nicaea in 325 places Easter on the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon, which is the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after March 21. Because that moon can fall anywhere in a 29-day window and Easter must then wait for a Sunday, Western Easter ranges from March 22 to April 25.

The churches do not use the astronomical full moon or the real equinox. They use tables, called the computus, that approximate the moon on a 19-year Metonic cycle and fix the equinox at March 21. That is why an astronomy almanac and the Easter date can occasionally disagree by a week.

• Earliest possible: March 22, last in 1818 and next in 2285.
• Latest possible: April 25, next in 2038.
• Most common: April 19, with April 18 close behind, when the dates are counted over millions of years of the Gregorian cycle.

Western dates use the Anonymous Gregorian algorithm, first published in the journal Nature in 1876 and popularised by Jean Meeus in Astronomical Algorithms. It takes the year through a short series of integer divisions: the year's place in the 19-year lunar cycle, century corrections for skipped leap years and for lunar drift, and a weekday step that moves the date to the following Sunday.

Orthodox dates use Meeus's Julian algorithm, which needs only the year modulo 4, 7 and 19. The result is a Julian date, which the calculator shifts by the calendar gap for that century: 10 days in the 1500s and 1600s, 13 days from 1900 to 2099, and 14 days from 2100 to 2199.

• No time zones or Date objects. Every step is whole-number arithmetic, so the answer does not change with your device's location.
• Checked range: every year from 1583 to 4099 returns a Sunday for both traditions, with the two dates always 0, 1, 4 or 5 weeks apart.

Much of the Christian year is counted from Easter, so one date sets a whole season. Ash Wednesday is 46 days earlier, which gives 40 fasting days once the six Sundays of Lent are excluded. Good Friday is 2 days before Easter, Ascension Day is 39 days after, on a Thursday, and Pentecost is 49 days after, on the seventh Sunday. For 2026 that means Ash Wednesday on February 18, Good Friday on April 3 and Pentecost on May 24.

• School and work calendars: spring breaks, the UK Easter bank holidays and many European public holidays move with these dates.
• Parishes and choirs: use the 10-year table to plan rehearsal seasons, confirmation dates and Holy Week schedules.
• Orthodox observances: Clean Monday, the start of Great Lent, is 48 days before Pascha.