🥚When is Easter?

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The next ten Easters, both traditions

The weekday column says Sunday ten times over, and that is the point: whatever else the computus does, it can only ever produce a Sunday. Read the two date columns side by side and the pattern in the gap shows up immediately — some years the two churches keep the feast together, and in others the Orthodox date is a month later.

Every figure in that table is generated when this page is built, from the same algorithm the calculator above runs in your browser, so the table and the widget cannot disagree with each other.

The dates that hang off it

Easter is not one date, it is the peg for about a dozen. Each of these is a fixed number of days from Easter Sunday, which means none of them can be memorised and all of them can be calculated:

• Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) — 47 days before
• Ash Wednesday — 46 days before, the first day of Lent
• Mothering Sunday in the UK and Ireland — 21 days before, the fourth Sunday of Lent
• Palm Sunday — 7 days before
• Good Friday — 2 days before
• Easter Monday — the day after
• Ascension — 39 days after, always a Thursday
• Pentecost (Whitsun) — 49 days after
• Whit Monday — 50 days after, still a public holiday in much of Europe

Where the rule came from

The First Council of Nicaea in 325 settled the principle rather than the arithmetic: the feast was to be kept on a Sunday, after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, and everywhere on the same day. Turning that into a calculation took centuries, and the result — the computus — is a table-driven scheme in which a 19-year lunar cycle is mapped onto the solar calendar and corrected as the centuries pass.

The Gregorian reform of 1582 rebuilt those correction tables along with the calendar itself. That is the moment the two traditions separated arithmetically: the principle stayed identical, the tables did not.

Where the two traditions part company

The Orthodox churches kept the Julian calendar for the computus. Two things follow. The Julian calendar now runs 13 days behind the Gregorian one, and the Julian lunar table has drifted further from the real moon than the Gregorian one has. Both differences push the Orthodox date later, which is why it never falls earlier than the Western one.

In Gregorian terms Orthodox Easter is confined to 4 April - 8 May, while the Western date lives between 22 March and 25 April. The windows overlap, and inside that overlap the two feasts can coincide exactly.

What it moves besides church services

Good Friday and Easter Monday are public holidays across most of Europe, Australia, Canada and Latin America, which means a moving pair of non-working days somewhere between late March and late April. School terms, bank clearing, freight schedules and quarter-end deadlines all shift with them, and in some years the pair falls in the first quarter and in others in the second.

If you are counting working days across that stretch, the business days calculator handles weekends and US federal holidays — but Good Friday is not a US federal holiday, so a European Easter shutdown has to be added by hand.

Easter is also the reason a reused wall calendar is only nearly right: the weekday grid can repeat exactly while Easter lands four weeks away, which is what the same calendar year finder warns about. For the astronomical events the computus deliberately ignores, see the season start dates; for the rest of the rule-driven dates on this site, the holiday dates group and the holiday date table lay them out together.