How many days until Easter?

What this countdown does

Easter moves further than any other holiday in the calendar — it can fall anywhere from 22 March to 25 April, a swing of more than a month. That is because it is not tied to a date at all: Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, which mixes the lunar and solar calendars together. Working it out by hand is genuinely awkward, so this page computes it for you, shows the days remaining, and rolls forward to the following year once Easter has passed.

How to use it

1. Open the page — the countdown is already running from today.
2. Read the days remaining and the exact date.
3. Check the weeks-and-days breakdown and the weekday it falls on.
4. Use Share to send the live countdown to anyone.

When it's useful

Use it to plan around a holiday whose position you cannot assume from memory. Because school breaks, public holidays, and a long weekend for most of Europe all hang off this one Sunday, knowing where it lands is what tells you whether the spring is front-loaded or back-loaded this year — and it is the reason booking flights or accommodation "around Easter" needs checking rather than guessing.

Easter Sunday dates for the coming years

The swing between years is large enough to catch people out — note the gap between 2029 and 2030:

• Sunday 28 March 2027
• Sunday 16 April 2028
• Sunday 1 April 2029
• Sunday 21 April 2030
• Sunday 13 April 2031

How the date is worked out

Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon falling on or after 21 March, the nominal date of the spring equinox. The full moon used is not the astronomical one but an ecclesiastical approximation from a fixed table, which is why published Easter dates occasionally differ by a week from what the sky would suggest. This page uses the standard Gregorian method — the Meeus/Jones/Butcher algorithm — which is the same calculation Western churches and civil calendars use.

The dates that move with it

Easter drags a good part of the spring calendar along behind it. Counting from Easter Sunday: Good Friday is two days before, Easter Monday the day after, Ascension Day falls 39 days later, and Pentecost — Whitsun — 49 days later. In several European countries most of those are public holidays, so when Easter is early the whole run of spring long weekends arrives early too, and when it is late they bunch towards summer.

Western and Orthodox Easter

This countdown targets Western Easter. Orthodox churches calculate the same rule on the Julian calendar, which usually puts Orthodox Easter later — sometimes by a week, sometimes by more than a month, and occasionally on the same day. If you are counting to the Orthodox date, this is not the right page.

How the days are counted

The count is in whole calendar days from today to the date you pick, calculated in UTC so it never drifts with time zones or daylight saving. If the date has already passed, the count shows how many days ago it was.