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Western (Gregorian) Easter: the Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after 21 March, always between 22 March and 25 April. Good Friday and Easter Monday are UK bank holidays. Orthodox Easter, reckoned on the Julian calendar, usually falls later.
What The Easter Date Calculator Works Out
- Easter Sunday: the Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after 21 March, the rule fixed by the Council of Nicaea in 325, computed with the standard Gregorian algorithm (valid for any year from 1583). The date roams a 35-day window from 22 March (last seen 1818, next 2285) to 25 April (next in 2038). The church runs on tabulated moons rather than telescopes, so it occasionally disagrees with the sky by a day.
- Good Friday and Easter Monday: two and one days either side of Easter Sunday. Both are bank holidays in England, Wales and Northern Ireland; Scotland has Good Friday but not Easter Monday as a statutory bank holiday, though many Scottish employers give it anyway.
- Nearby years: Easter in the following three years, since an April Easter versus a March one meaningfully shifts school terms, retail and travel seasons.
- Orthodox Easter (advanced): the Eastern churches still compute Easter on the Julian calendar, so it usually falls one to five weeks later and occasionally coincides, as in 2025. Both dates are shown on the modern calendar, with the gap.
- Mothering Sunday (advanced): the fourth Sunday of Lent, three weeks before Easter, which is why UK Mother's Day moves each year and falls anywhere from 1 March to 4 April, unlike the fixed second Sunday in May used in the US.
- Shrove Tuesday (advanced): Pancake Day, 47 days before Easter, the last day before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. It can fall as early as 3 February or as late as 9 March.
- Easter Act 1928 (advanced): Parliament passed an Act fixing Easter as the Sunday after the second Saturday in April (so always 9 to 15 April), but it has never been brought into force because it requires the churches' agreement. The card shows where Easter would have fallen under it, a conversation sixteen centuries in the making.
- Moveable feasts table (advanced): every date in the year that hangs off Easter, from Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday through Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday to Ascension Day (39 days after), Whit Sunday (49 days), Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi. The Spring Bank Holiday was Whit Monday until 1971, when it was fixed to the last Monday in May.
- Year table (advanced): Western and Orthodox Easter for the next 10 (or up to 50) years with the gap between them, handy for planning weddings, holidays and school terms years ahead.