Days Until Easter 🐣

The computus: how Easter’s date is calculated

Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21 — but not the astronomical full moon. The church uses an idealized “ecclesiastical” moon defined by 19-year cycles, a system called the computus, so Easter can be computed centuries ahead with pure arithmetic. This page uses Gauss’s famous Easter algorithm, which condenses the whole rule into a handful of divisions and remainders and is exact for every year from 1900 to 2099.

The possible range is wide: March 22 at the earliest (last in 1818, next in 2285) and April 25 at the latest (most recently 1943, next in 2038). That five-week spread is why Easter feels “early” some years and “late” in others.

A moving target for spring plans

Because Easter moves, everything anchored to it moves too: Good Friday (two days before), Palm Sunday (a week before), Mardi Gras (47 days before) and many school spring breaks. An early Easter compresses the gap after Valentine’s Day; a late one pushes spring break into late April. Easter is also the second-biggest US candy holiday after Halloween — and unlike Halloween, the date shift means the seasonal aisle timing changes every year. Check the computed date above before booking spring travel.

Counting toward a date of your own instead? The days from today calculator adds any number of days to today, and the days between dates calculator measures the gap between any two dates — deadlines, anniversaries or trips.

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