Easter Countdown

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Easter Sunday is the principal feast of the Christian year, commemorating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a moveable feast — falling between March 22 and April 25 in the Western (Gregorian) calendar, on the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after the spring equinox.

When does Easter fall? The Computus rule

Easter is a moveable feast. The rule was standardised at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD and refined by subsequent church practice:

Easter Sunday = the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon falling on or after March 21.

Three points matter for the calculation:

“Ecclesiastical full moon” means a tabulated approximation, not the astronomical full moon. The church uses fixed lunar tables (derived from the 19-year Metonic cycle) so that any computer can determine Easter from arithmetic alone, without astronomical observation.
March 21 is the ecclesiastical equinox, fixed for liturgical purposes. The actual astronomical equinox falls on March 19, 20 or 21 depending on the year, but the church uses March 21 by convention.
If the ecclesiastical full moon falls on a Sunday, Easter is the following Sunday — it is never the same day as the Paschal Full Moon itself.

The resulting window is March 22 to April 25 (35 possible dates) in the Western Gregorian calculation. The algorithm Carl Friedrich Gauss published in 1800 is the most widely used modern formulation; the US Naval Observatory and most ecclesiastical calendars use it directly.

Upcoming Easter dates

Year	Easter Sunday (Western)	Day of week
2027	March 28, 2027	Sunday
2028	April 16, 2028	Sunday
2029	April 1, 2029	Sunday
2030	April 21, 2030	Sunday
2031	April 13, 2031	Sunday

Dates are for Western (Gregorian) Easter as used by Roman Catholic, Anglican, and most Protestant churches. Eastern Orthodox Easter (Pascha) usually falls one to five weeks later because it uses Julian-calendar inputs.

Why Orthodox Easter differs

The First Council of Nicaea unified the rule but not the inputs. Catholic and Protestant churches use the Gregorian calendar (introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582), which dropped 10 days in October 1582 to realign with the astronomical equinox. The Eastern Orthodox churches retained the Julian calendar, which now runs 13 days behind the Gregorian. As a result:

Orthodox Easter uses the Julian-calendar reckoning of March 21 (currently April 3 in the civil Gregorian calendar) as the equinox baseline.
The two Easters coincide only when the Paschal Full Moon falls in a narrow window. Recent coinciding years include 2010, 2011, 2014, 2017, and 2025. Next coincidences: 2028 and 2031.

A short history of the Easter date

The earliest Christians observed the Resurrection on the Sunday following Passover (14 Nisan in the Hebrew calendar). By the 2nd century, two practices had emerged in the early church: the Quartodeciman tradition (Asia Minor) which celebrated Easter on 14 Nisan regardless of the day of the week, and the Western/Alexandrian tradition which insisted on a Sunday. The Quartodeciman controversy was settled at Nicaea (325 AD) in favour of the Sunday observance.

For centuries, different parts of Christendom used different astronomical tables and methods, producing competing Easter dates. The Synod of Whitby (664 AD) brought English Christianity into line with the Roman calculation. Pope Gregory XIII’s reform (1582) realigned the calendar with the astronomical year and produced the modern Western Easter. The Orthodox East declined the reform, producing the present split.

Several 20th- and 21st-century proposals (including by the World Council of Churches and Pope Francis in 2015) have sought a unified Christian Easter date — the proposed compromise being the Sunday following the second Saturday in April, putting Easter between April 9 and 15 every year. None has been adopted.

Traditions and observance

Holy Week — the seven days from Palm Sunday to Holy Saturday, the most solemn period of the Christian year. Includes Maundy Thursday (the Last Supper), Good Friday (the Crucifixion), and Easter Vigil (Saturday night).
Lent — the 40-day fast preceding Easter, beginning on Ash Wednesday. The 40 days exclude Sundays.
Easter eggs — preservation and decoration of eggs during Lent is medieval; the chocolate Easter egg dates from 1870s France and Germany. Fabergé imperial eggs (1885–1917) were a Russian Orthodox extension.
The Easter Bunny — first recorded in 17th-century German Lutheran writings (Osterhase); brought to the US by Pennsylvania Dutch immigrants in the 1700s.
Hot cross buns — spiced sweet buns marked with a cross, traditionally eaten on Good Friday. The earliest attested recipe is from 14th-century England.
Easter Monday — a public holiday in most European countries, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Not a federal holiday in the US.

Sources & references

Encyclopaedia Britannica — Easter
US Naval Observatory — Date of Easter — official astronomical calculation, Gregorian and Julian.
Vatican Archive — Ecumenical Councils — including the Nicaea Easter ruling.
Gauss, Carl Friedrich (1800). “Berechnung des Osterfestes” (Computation of Easter) — original publication of the modern algorithm.

FAQs

Easter is the oldest Christian feast and was tied to the Jewish Passover, which follows a lunar calendar. The First Council of Nicaea (325 AD) standardised the rule: Easter is the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon falling on or after the vernal equinox (taken as March 21 for liturgical purposes). Because lunar and solar cycles don’t align cleanly, the date drifts between March 22 and April 25 in any given Western year.

In the Western (Gregorian) calculation, Easter can fall on any Sunday from March 22 to April 25 — a 35-day window. The latest Easter of the 20th and 21st centuries was April 25, 1943; the next April 25 Easter will be 2038. The earliest Easter of recent centuries was March 22, 1818; the next March 22 Easter falls in 2285. Most years cluster in the late March to mid-April range.

Both follow the Nicaea rule, but with different inputs. The Catholic and Protestant West uses the Gregorian calendar (introduced 1582) and Gregorian astronomical tables for the equinox and full moon. The Eastern Orthodox church uses the Julian calendar and older astronomical tables, which currently put their equinox 13 days later. As a result, Orthodox Easter (Pascha) is most often one to five weeks after Western Easter; occasionally the two coincide (next: 2028 and 2031).

The Computus (Latin for “computation”) is the historical algorithm used to determine Easter’s date. The most widely used modern version is Gauss’s Easter algorithm (1800), which produces the Gregorian Easter date from any given year using arithmetic operations on the year number alone, the “golden number” (position in the 19-year Metonic lunar cycle), and the epact. The result is the date of the “Paschal Full Moon” (an ecclesiastical approximation, not the astronomical full moon), with Easter as the following Sunday.

Both were originally meant to coincide — the early Christian Easter was tied directly to Passover (Greek Pascha, from Hebrew Pesach). But Western Easter follows the Gregorian astronomical equinox while Passover follows the Hebrew lunar-solar calendar, which adds a leap month in 7 of every 19 years. In years when Passover falls before the Gregorian equinox — or where the Hebrew leap-month falls awkwardly — Christian Easter can land four to five weeks later. In some years they coincide exactly.

Eggs were a forbidden food during the medieval Christian Lenten fast; eggs laid during Lent were preserved (sometimes hard-boiled and decorated) and eaten at Easter to break the fast. The Christian symbolic interpretation — the egg as the sealed tomb from which life emerges — was layered on later. The Easter Bunny (the Osterhase) is a German Lutheran folk tradition first recorded in the 1600s, in which a hare brought coloured eggs to well-behaved children. Pennsylvania Dutch immigrants brought it to the US in the 18th century.