DaysUntilNowHow many days until Easter?
Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox
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How many days are there until Easter Sunday?
The DaysUntilNow Easter countdown runs to midnight at the start of Easter Sunday on your own clock โ a date that has to be computed before it can be counted, which is what makes this the odd one out among countdowns. Easter is a moveable feast: it is tied to a lunar rule rather than to a square in the calendar, so it wanders across five weeks of spring.
For the counter that changes nothing. Once the date for the year is known it is an ordinary count of whole days between midnights, with the hours, minutes and seconds beside them.
What it changes is everything hanging off it. Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Ascension and Pentecost are all defined as offsets from Easter Sunday, so the whole set moves together โ and a school term, a bank holiday and a fortnight of flight prices move with them.
Why this countdown moves and the others don’t
Christmas is a square in the calendar; Easter is the answer to a question about the moon. The rule settled in the fourth century ties it to the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, which means the date has to be worked out for each year before anybody can count down to it.
This page does the counting. The arithmetic itself โ the ecclesiastical moon, the epact, the reason the Western and Orthodox churches get different answers from the same sentence โ lives on the when is Easter calculator, which will compute any year from 1583 onwards for either tradition and show its working.
The practical effect is a five-week band in spring where a fixed-date holiday would have a single square. That is what the table below is really for.
Ten Easters, and the Orthodox date beside them
| Year | Date | Day of week | Orthodox Easter | Weekend? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2027 | March 28 | Sunday | May 2 | Yes |
| 2028 | April 16 | Sunday | April 16 | Yes |
| 2029 | April 1 | Sunday | April 8 | Yes |
| 2030 | April 21 | Sunday | April 28 | Yes |
| 2031 | April 13 | Sunday | April 13 | Yes |
| 2032 | March 28 | Sunday | May 2 | Yes |
| 2033 | April 17 | Sunday | April 24 | Yes |
| 2034 | April 9 | Sunday | April 9 | Yes |
| 2035 | March 25 | Sunday | April 29 | Yes |
| 2036 | April 13 | Sunday | April 20 | Yes |
Both columns are computed from their own rule when this page is built, not read from a list, so they can be compared without anybody having transcribed anything. Some years they land on the same Sunday; in others they stand weeks apart, and the FAQ below explains why the gap is never an arbitrary number of days.
The weekday column is a formality here โ Easter is always a Sunday, by definition, and that is the one thing about the date that never changes. What the table is worth using for is the year ahead: finding out in September that next Easter is in the third week of April is what makes booking possible.
For any other date question in that part of the year, the holiday dates tools work out the seasons, the clock changes and the observed days off, and the holiday date table puts everything this site tracks in one view.
What moves with Easter
Once the Sunday is fixed, a dozen other dates fall into place, because each of them is defined as a fixed distance from it rather than as a date of its own:
- Shrove Tuesday โ 47 days before. Pancake day in Britain and Ireland, Mardi Gras elsewhere.
- Ash Wednesday โ 46 days before, and the start of Lent.
- Palm Sunday โ 7 days before, opening Holy Week.
- Maundy Thursday โ 3 days before.
- Good Friday โ 2 days before, and the most widely kept public holiday of the set.
- Easter Monday โ 1 day after.
- Ascension โ 39 days after, which always makes it a Thursday.
- Pentecost, or Whit Sunday โ 49 days after.
Lent is described as forty days but Ash Wednesday sits forty-six days before Easter, and the difference is the six Sundays inside it, which are not counted as fast days. That single detail explains more confused calendar entries than any other in this list.
Counted in weeks, weekends and working days
| Counted in | How many | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Days | 226 | Whole calendar days, not counting today |
| Sleeps | 226 | Nights left โ the same number, which is why children and calendars agree |
| Weeks | 32 weeks and 2 days | 32.29 weeks in decimal |
| Weekends | 33 Saturdays and 33 Sundays | 66 weekend days to work with |
| Working days | 152 | Monday to Friday, with 8 US federal holidays taken out |
| Hours | 5,424 | 325,440 minutes, if you are counting that closely |
The working-day row skips Saturdays, Sundays and US federal holidays โ and neither Good Friday nor Easter Monday is one of those, so for a British or Canadian reader the real figure is one or two days lower than the table says. Where a page here depends on public holidays, it uses the American list unless it says otherwise.
The weekend count is the more useful number for this particular holiday anyway. Easter is a weekend event by construction, so what people are actually planning around is the number of free days left before the one that matters.
Planning around a date that swings five weeks
The wandering date is not a curiosity; it is the whole reason this countdown gets used. School breaks in the UK and Ireland are built around Easter, so their dates move with it. Flight and ferry prices follow the school breaks. Business quarters do not move at all, which is why an early Easter and a late one produce completely different-looking Aprils.
Three things are worth pinning as soon as the date is known: the travel days at either end of the break, the last working day before Good Friday, and whatever family gathering has to be negotiated around both.
None of those are Easter Sunday itself, and that is what the countdown you build yourself is for: a date, a time of day and a name, all carried in the link, with no account to make. For dates that repeat on a rule rather than once, the planners hold the whole list. The Christmas countdown is the other end of the year, and the full list of countdowns has everything in between.
Frequently asked questions
Will Easter ever be given a fixed date?
There is already a law for it that has never been switched on. The UK’s Easter Act 1928 would put Easter on the Sunday after the second Saturday in April โ always between April 9 and 15 โ but it takes effect only through an Order in Council that no government has ever laid, because the Act was written to wait for agreement among the churches. That agreement has never come. The question returned in 2025, the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, when the Western and Orthodox dates both fell on April 20 and church leaders again said they were open to a common date.
Why do Easter and Orthodox Easter sometimes fall on the same Sunday?
Both traditions use the same rule โ the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox โ but the Orthodox churches apply it on the Julian calendar, which now runs 13 days behind the Gregorian one, and use a fixed lunar table rather than the observed moon. The result is that the two dates are 0, 1, 4 or 5 weeks apart, never anything in between. They coincide in 2025, 2028, 2031, 2034 and 2037; in 2027 they are as far apart as the rule allows, March 28 in the West and May 2 in the East.
Is Easter Monday a day off?
Not in the United States: neither Good Friday nor Easter Monday is a federal holiday, and federal offices work both days. In the UK, Easter Monday is a bank holiday in England, Wales and Northern Ireland but not in Scotland, whose list carries Good Friday instead. In Canada, Good Friday is the nationally recognised statutory day, Easter Monday is a paid day for the federal public service and federally regulated employers, and Quebec lets the employer choose which of the two to give.
How late in the year can Easter be?
In the Western calendar Easter never leaves the window from March 22 to April 25. The latest possible date, April 25, last occurred in 1943 and next occurs in 2038; the earliest, March 22, last occurred in 1818 and does not return until 2285. Orthodox Pascha runs later on the Gregorian calendar, as far as May 8, which is why the gap between the two celebrations can reach five weeks.
Does Passover always fall near Easter?
Usually, and for a good reason: the Gospels place the events of Holy Week at Passover, and both festivals are set by the same spring full moon. But the two calendars keep that moon differently. The Hebrew calendar adds a whole leap month in seven years out of nineteen to hold Passover in spring, and in some of those years the adjustment lands on the far side of Easter โ in 2024 Easter Sunday was March 31 and Passover began on the evening of April 22, more than three weeks later. So expect them close, but never assume it.
Why is it called Easter in English when most languages call it Pascha?
Because English and German took a different word. Almost every European language builds its name on the Greek and Latin Pascha, itself from the Hebrew Pesach โ Pรขques in French, Pasqua in Italian, Pascua in Spanish, Pรฅsk in Swedish. English uses Easter and German Ostern, which the Venerable Bede, writing in the eighth century, traced to ฤosturmลnaรพ, an Anglo-Saxon month named after a goddess called ฤostre. Bede is the only source for her, which is why the etymology is repeated everywhere and settled nowhere. The Pascha root survives in English in the word paschal.
How we calculate this
The counter runs in your browser against your device clock and aims at midnight at the start of Easter Sunday in your own time zone.
The dates themselves are not stored as a list here: both columns of the table are computed at build time from the ecclesiastical rule, the Western one on the Gregorian calendar and the Orthodox one on the Julian calendar with its result converted forward. That is the same calculation the Easter date calculator performs for any year you ask it for, and it is documented in full on that page rather than repeated here.
The feast offsets used on this page โ Shrove Tuesday at 47 days before, Ash Wednesday at 46, Palm Sunday at 7, Good Friday at 2, Ascension at 39 days after, Pentecost at 49 โ are fixed distances from Easter Sunday, so once the Sunday is known, none of them needs a lookup.
Sources:
Good to know
A moving date breaks recurring plans quietly. A calendar entry repeated “every year on the same date” will be wrong for Easter in eleven years out of twelve, and nothing in the entry announces it.
The long weekend is not the same length everywhere. Depending on the country, the days off run from Good Friday to Easter Monday, or cover only one of the two, so a four-day break in London is an ordinary working Friday in New York.
Prices move with the date, not with the month. Flights, ferries and family accommodation follow the school breaks that straddle Easter, so an early Easter drags the expensive fortnight into March and a late one pushes it deep into April.