Countdown to Easter Sunday

Easter Sunday is the most movable of major holidays, landing anywhere from late March to late April. The date follows the lunar calendar, which is exactly why an automatic countdown beats checking a calendar.

About Easter Sunday

Easter is the oldest and most structurally important feast in the Christian calendar, and the reason so much of that calendar moves. Its date was disputed for centuries before the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD settled on a lunar rule tied to the spring equinox, deliberately decoupling it from the Jewish calendar it had previously followed. That rule still governs the date today and still produces a different answer in Western and Eastern churches.

Egg decorating and egg hunts, both older than their Christian associations, along with a family meal and — in much of Europe — a four-day weekend spanning Good Friday to Easter Monday. Because the date moves so widely, Easter can arrive in genuine winter weather or in full spring, which shapes local custom considerably.

Why Easter Sunday falls when it does

Easter is the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon falling on or after March 21, which places it anywhere from March 22 to April 25 — a five-week window, the widest of any major holiday. The calculation, known as the computus, uses a schematic church approximation of the lunar cycle rather than the true astronomical moon, so it can differ from an actual full moon by a day or two. Orthodox churches apply the same rule to the Julian calendar and therefore usually arrive at a different Sunday, most often one to five weeks later.

Is Easter Sunday a public holiday?

Easter Sunday is not a US federal holiday — it always falls on a Sunday, so the question rarely arises — and neither is Good Friday at the federal level, though a number of states and many school districts observe it. This differs sharply elsewhere: Good Friday and Easter Monday are both public holidays across much of Europe, the UK, Australia, and Canada, which makes Easter a four-day weekend in those countries and an ordinary one in the US.

What to actually count down to

Because the date swings across five weeks, Easter is the holiday people most often misremember, and it drags a cluster of other dates with it — Ash Wednesday, Lent, Good Friday, and Pentecost are all defined by their offset from Easter Sunday. A countdown is genuinely more useful here than for a fixed holiday, since there is no reliable intuition to fall back on.

Common questions

When is Easter Sunday?

Easter Sunday falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox — between March 22 and April 25, changing every year. This page shows a live countdown to the next occurrence.

How do I put a Easter Sunday countdown on my iPhone?

The Rouse app for iOS includes a one-tap Easter Sunday countdown template. It recurs yearly and auto-advances after each occurrence, supports up to 5 alerts (for example, 1 day before), and can appear on your Lock Screen as a widget. The free tier includes 2 countdowns.

Why does Easter change date every year?

Easter is set by a lunar rule rather than a fixed calendar date: it is the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after March 21. Because the lunar cycle does not divide evenly into the solar year, that Sunday lands anywhere between March 22 and April 25.

What is the earliest and latest Easter can be?

March 22 at the earliest and April 25 at the latest, under the Western rule. Both extremes are rare — Easter clusters toward the middle of that range in most years.

Why is Orthodox Easter on a different day?

Orthodox churches apply the same lunar rule but reckon it against the Julian calendar, which has drifted from the Gregorian calendar by 13 days. The two Easters coincide occasionally but Orthodox Easter usually falls one to five weeks after the Western date.

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