Easter Date Calculator

By the Age-Finder team · Last updated 7 November 2026

The calculator below gives both dates, plus the feasts that move with them, for any year from 1583 to 4099.

The Easter Date Calculator finds the date of Easter Sunday for any year from 1583 to 4099, for both the Western churches and the Orthodox churches, with the dates of Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension Day and Pentecost.

How to Use the Easter Date Calculator

Type a year, or leave the box empty for the current year. Select Find Easter. The result shows Western Easter Sunday, Orthodox Easter Sunday, the related holidays, the days until Easter and the gap between the two dates.

The Try chips fill in this year, next year, 2030 or 1990 with one tap. To count down to Easter or any other date, use the Countdown Calculator.

Easter Dates 2026 to 2036

In 2028, 2031 and 2034, both traditions celebrate Easter on the same Sunday. Note that 2027 and 2032 share the same pair of dates, and 2035 has the widest gap in this table at five weeks.

How the Date of Easter Is Set

Easter is a moveable feast. The rule agreed by the early Church is that Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. In practice, churches do not use the real Moon or the real equinox. They use fixed tables: The equinox is fixed at 21 March.

The “full moon” is the ecclesiastical full moon, calculated from a 19-year cycle, not the astronomical one. Easter is the Sunday after that full moon, so it can never fall on the full moon day itself. As a result, Western Easter always falls between 22 March and 25 April, as the U.S. Naval Observatory explains.

The Paschal full moon

The “full moon” in the rule is the Paschal full moon: the 14th day of a tabulated lunar month, not the astronomical full moon you can see in the sky.

It comes from the 19-year Metonic cycle, in which 19 solar years hold about 235 lunar months, so the moon phases repeat on nearly the same dates every 19 years.

Each year has a Golden Number, its position in that cycle, which is the year modulo 19, plus 1. Easter is the Sunday after the Paschal full moon, never on the day itself.

Notice 2032: the Paschal full moon falls on a Saturday, so Easter is the very next day. And notice 2027: the full moon is on Monday 22 March, six days before Easter. The tool does not show the Paschal full moon; the table above fills that gap.

Why Orthodox Easter Is Often Later

The Orthodox churches use the same rule, but with the older Julian calendar for the equinox and the full-moon tables.

The Julian calendar is currently 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar, so the Orthodox date is usually one to five weeks later than the Western date, and sometimes the same day. Orthodox Easter currently falls between 4 April and 8 May in the Gregorian calendar.

The gap is never two or three weeks. Across the two centuries from 1900 to 2099, the two Easters fall on the same Sunday in 57 years, one week apart in 91 years, four weeks apart in 9 years and five weeks apart in 43 years.

Four or five weeks together make 52 years, so the pattern is: same day, one week, or four to five weeks, with nothing in between.

How the Calculator Works

For Western Easter, the calculator uses the Gregorian computus published by Jean Meeus, the method most software uses. For Orthodox Easter, it calculates the date in the Julian calendar and converts it to the Gregorian calendar.

We checked both against an independent implementation for every year from 1583 to 4099: all 2,517 years matched. The Gregorian rule began in 1583, the first full year after the Gregorian calendar was introduced, so earlier years are not available.

The Western algorithm is the Anonymous Gregorian computus, fifteen integer steps from a year to a date. Worked through for 2027:

Result: Easter 2027 is Sunday, 28 March. The step that matters most is h: it is 1, so the Paschal full moon falls one day after 21 March, on Monday 22 March, and the Sunday after it is 28 March.

The corrections f and g account for the slow drift between the lunar tables and the real moon over centuries, and d and e handle the Gregorian leap-year rule that skips leap days in most century years.

Holidays That Follow Easter

Several holidays move with Easter:

The calculator shows these for the Western date. In many countries, Good Friday and Easter Monday are public holidays. For 2027 that gives Ash Wednesday 10 February, Good Friday 26 March, Easter Monday 29 March, Ascension Day 6 May and Pentecost 16 May.

The Orthodox feasts fall on different dates, because they are counted from Orthodox Easter instead. The tool does not show them, so they are worked out here for 2027, when Orthodox Easter is Sunday 2 May:

Note the first row: Orthodox Lent begins on Clean Monday, not Ash Wednesday, 48 days before Easter rather than 46. The other five feasts use the same offsets as the Western ones.

The Earliest and Latest Easter

The earliest possible Western Easter is 22 March and the latest is 25 April. Both are rare. Easter last fell on 22 March in 1818 and next will in 2285. It fell on 25 April in 1943 and will next in 2038.

The most common Western Easter date, over the 2,517 years from 1583 to 4099, is 10 April, which occurs 102 times, ahead of 5 April at 99 times and 30 March at 98 times.

Easter in Your Own Diary

Because Easter moves, the holidays around it move too. In 2026, Good Friday was 3 April and Easter Monday 6 April; in 2027 they fall on 26 March and 29 March, a week earlier than most people expect.

School spring holidays in many countries are planned around Easter, so checking a few years ahead helps when booking travel. To check the weekday of any Easter date, use the Day of the Week Calculator, and to count the days between two Easters, use the Days Between Dates Calculator.

A Short History of the Easter Date

Early Christian communities disagreed about when to celebrate Easter. The Council of Nicaea in 325 is traditionally credited with setting the principle of a Sunday after the spring full moon, and the tables used to apply it were refined over the following centuries.

When Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar in 1582, the Easter tables were reformed with it, which is why Western and Orthodox churches have used different dates ever since. Several proposals to agree on a common date have been discussed, but none has been adopted.

What other Easter calculators offer

Most Easter calculators on the first page give the same two dates this one does, so what sets them apart is what else they show. The comparison below is against the three Easter calculators that rank highest.

What is still missing: the tool shows no Paschal full moon, no algorithm walkthrough and no Orthodox feast dates, and its year range stops at 4099 while labs.llc goes to 9999. What it adds is the days-until count, the gap in weeks, and the walkthrough and feast tables worked through by hand in the guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• Jean Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms (the Gregorian and Julian Easter algorithms).
• U.S. Naval Observatory: The Date of Easter (how Easter is calculated).
• Age-Finder methodology (how dates are handled).