When is Easter in 2026 and 2027?
Easter Sunday falls on April 5, 2026 and on March 28, 2027. Orthodox Easter is a week later in 2026, on April 12, and five weeks later in 2027, on May 2. The calculator above gives the date for any year from 1583, the first full year of the Gregorian calendar, to 2400, along with all the feasts that depend on it.
The rule: the first Sunday after the spring full moon
In 325, the Council of Nicaea agreed that all Christians should celebrate Easter on the same Sunday. The rule that came out of it, and that the churches still use, is simple to state: Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox.
Two details make it less simple than it looks. The equinox is fixed by convention on March 21, even though the real one can fall on March 19 or 20. And the full moon is not the one astronomers observe: it is an “ecclesiastical” full moon, read from tables built on the 19-year Metonic cycle, after which the phases of the Moon come back to nearly the same calendar dates. Most years the two moons agree, but not always, which is why Easter can seem to fall “too late” compared with the sky.
With these conventions, Easter can fall on any date from March 22 to April 25. March 22 is rare: the last time was 1818 and the next will be 2285. April 25 last happened in 1943 and will come back in 2038.
How the date is calculated
The calculation of Easter, called the computus, was reworked in 1582 with the Gregorian reform, which corrected both the drift of the calendar against the seasons and the drift of the lunar tables. Today it fits in a few lines of integer arithmetic. The version used here is the “anonymous Gregorian algorithm”, published in 1876 and taken up by Jean Meeus in Astronomical Algorithms. Every division keeps only the whole part.
| Step | Formula | 2027 |
|---|---|---|
| Golden number, minus 1 | a = year mod 19 | 13 |
| Century and year in the century | b = year ÷ 100, c = year mod 100 | 20 and 27 |
| Leap-year corrections | d = b ÷ 4, e = b mod 4 | 5 and 0 |
| Moon corrections | f = (b + 8) ÷ 25, g = (b − f + 1) ÷ 3 | 1 and 6 |
| Days from March 21 to the Paschal full moon | h = (19a + b − d − g + 15) mod 30 | 1 |
| Weekday corrections | i = c ÷ 4, k = c mod 4 | 6 and 3 |
| Days from the full moon to Sunday | l = (32 + 2e + 2i − h − k) mod 7 | 5 |
| Rare correction | m = (a + 11h + 22l) ÷ 451 | 0 |
| Month and day | month = (h + l − 7m + 114) ÷ 31, day = ((h + l − 7m + 114) mod 31) + 1 | March 28 |
The result for 2027 is March 28, the same date the churches publish. The algorithm is exact for every Gregorian year, with no exception to handle by hand.
Orthodox Easter
Most Orthodox churches apply the same Nicaea rule, but with the Julian calendar and the old lunar tables. The Julian calendar is now 13 days behind the Gregorian one (14 days from March 2100), so Orthodox Easter is usually later: by one week, four weeks or five weeks. Some years both dates coincide, as in 2025, 2028, 2031, 2034, 2037 and 2038. Switch to Orthodox at the bottom of the tool to see the Eastern date and its feasts: Clean Monday, the start of Great Lent, then Holy Friday, Ascension and Pentecost.
The movable feasts
A whole season follows Easter, always at the same distance. Lent starts on Ash Wednesday, 46 days before Easter: 40 days of fasting, Sundays not counted. Ascension falls 39 days after Easter, so always on a Thursday, and Pentecost 49 days after, seven weeks to the day.
| Feast | Days from Easter | 2026 | 2027 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mardi Gras (Shrove Tuesday) | -47 | February 17 | February 9 |
| Ash Wednesday, start of Lent | -46 | February 18 | February 10 |
| Palm Sunday | -7 | March 29 | March 21 |
| Holy Thursday | -3 | April 2 | March 25 |
| Good Friday | -2 | April 3 | March 26 |
| Easter Monday | +1 | April 6 | March 29 |
| Ascension Day | +39 | May 14 | May 6 |
| Pentecost (Whit Sunday) | +49 | May 24 | May 16 |
| Whit Monday | +50 | May 25 | May 17 |
| Corpus Christi | +60 | June 4 | May 27 |
Several of these days are public holidays in many countries, and they move with Easter: Good Friday in the UK, Canada and Germany, Easter Monday in France, Belgium and Italy, Ascension and Whit Monday in much of Europe. The public holidays calendar lists them country by country, and Ascension’s Thursday makes the Friday after a classic bridge day.
Easter dates from 2020 to 2040
| Year | Easter (Western) | Orthodox Easter |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | April 12 | April 19 |
| 2021 | April 4 | May 2 |
| 2022 | April 17 | April 24 |
| 2023 | April 9 | April 16 |
| 2024 | March 31 | May 5 |
| 2025 | April 20 | April 20 (same day) |
| 2026 | April 5 | April 12 |
| 2027 | March 28 | May 2 |
| 2028 | April 16 | April 16 (same day) |
| 2029 | April 1 | April 8 |
| 2030 | April 21 | April 28 |
| 2031 | April 13 | April 13 (same day) |
| 2032 | March 28 | May 2 |
| 2033 | April 17 | April 24 |
| 2034 | April 9 | April 9 (same day) |
| 2035 | March 25 | April 29 |
| 2036 | April 13 | April 20 |
| 2037 | April 5 | April 5 (same day) |
| 2038 | April 25 | April 25 (same day) |
| 2039 | April 10 | April 17 |
| 2040 | April 1 | May 6 |
For the details of a given year, with its holidays and its bridge days, see Easter 2026, Easter 2027, Easter 2028, Easter 2029 or Easter 2030. To know on which day of the week any date falls, use the day of the week tool; for the real phases of the Moon, the moon phase calendar.