Easter Date Calculator
Find the date of Easter Sunday for any year from 1583 to 4099, Western and Orthodox, with Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Ascension and Pentecost.
Result
Easter Sunday (Western): March 28, 2027
Dates follow the church tables, not the observed moon. The Ethiopian and Eritrean churches use the Orthodox date.
- Easter Sunday (Orthodox)
- May 2, 2027
- Western and Orthodox
- Orthodox Easter is 5 weeks after Western Easter
- Ash Wednesday
- February 10, 2027
- Palm Sunday
- March 21, 2027
- Good Friday
- March 26, 2027
- Ascension Day
- May 6, 2027
- Pentecost
- May 16, 2027
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How to use the Easter Date Calculator
- Enter a year from 1583 to 4099.
- Read Western Easter Sunday, kept by the Catholic and Protestant churches, and Orthodox Easter Sunday.
- Use the dates below them for Lent, Holy Week, Ascension and Pentecost, all counted from Western Easter.
The rule and the tables
The Council of Nicaea in 325 agreed that Easter should be kept on a Sunday after the spring full moon. The rule that emerged is simple: the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after 21 March. What makes it hard is that the full moon is the date in a church table, not the moon in the sky.
Easter = first Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon on or after 21 MarchWestern Gregorian calendar and tables (1582)Orthodox Julian calendar and tables, then shown as a Gregorian dateThe Gregorian tables follow the moon through a 19-year cycle and correct for the leap days the Gregorian calendar drops and for the slow drift of the lunar cycle. The algorithm this page uses folds all of that into a few lines of whole-number arithmetic. It is the version Jean Meeus gives in Astronomical Algorithms, valid for every Gregorian year.
Orthodox Easter
The Orthodox churches still use the Julian calendar and its older full-moon tables for Easter, even where they use the Gregorian calendar for everything else. The page works out Orthodox Easter as a Julian date and then converts it to the Gregorian date people see on a wall calendar. The gap between the two calendars grows by a day every century that skips a Gregorian leap year, so from 2100 Orthodox Easter moves a day later in the Gregorian calendar.
With your numbers
- Easter is the first Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon on or after 21 March
- Orthodox churches apply the same rule in the Julian calendar, then the date is converted to the Gregorian calendar
Quick reference
Dates follow the church tables, not the observed moon. The Ethiopian and Eritrean churches use the Orthodox date.
| Example | Easter Sunday (Western) |
|---|---|
| 2026 | April 5, 2026 |
| 2027 | March 28, 2027 |
| 2028 | April 16, 2028 |
| 2029 | April 1, 2029 |
| 2030 | April 21, 2030 |
| 2034 | April 9, 2034 |
| 2038 | April 25, 2038 |
| 2285 | March 22, 2285 |
Common questions about the Easter Date Calculator
- How is the date of Easter decided?
- Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after 21 March. The full moon here is not the one astronomers observe but an ecclesiastical full moon, read from tables the churches fixed centuries ago, so the date can be worked out exactly for any year. Easter therefore falls between 22 March and 25 April.
- Why do Orthodox churches usually celebrate Easter later?
- They apply the same rule in the Julian calendar, with the Julian calendar's tables for the full moon. The Julian calendar is now 13 days behind the Gregorian one, and its full-moon tables have drifted too, so Orthodox Easter is the same Sunday as Western Easter in about one year in four, and otherwise one, four or five weeks later.
- What are the earliest and latest possible dates?
- Western Easter can fall from 22 March to 25 April. The last 22 March Easter was in 1818 and the next is in 2285; the latest, 25 April, last happened in 1943 and next comes in 2038. Orthodox Easter, converted to the Gregorian calendar, falls between 4 April and 8 May in this century.
- Why does the page start at 1583?
- The Gregorian calendar and its Easter tables came into use in October 1582, so 1583 is the first full year they cover. Several countries switched much later, Britain and its colonies in 1752, so a Western Easter date before then may not be the one a particular country kept.
- How are the other feast days counted?
- From Western Easter Sunday: Ash Wednesday is 46 days before, Palm Sunday a week before, Good Friday two days before, Ascension Day 39 days after (a Thursday) and Pentecost 49 days after. Some countries move Ascension to the following Sunday.