When is Easter?

Easter Sunday, 2026 to 2035

How the date is worked out

The Calendar (New Style) Act 1750, which moved Britain to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, includes the tables used to find Easter. They do not follow the real moon in the sky. Instead, each year is given a golden number from 1 to 19, matching the 19-year cycle after which the phases of the moon fall on nearly the same dates, and the tables give the date of the paschal full moon for each golden number. Easter is the Sunday after that date. If the paschal full moon is itself a Sunday, Easter is the following Sunday.

The engine of this site uses the same computation in arithmetic form and has been checked against every Easter from 1900 to 2100: always a Sunday, always between 22 March and 25 April. The earliest possible date, 22 March, last happened in 1818 and next happens in 2285; the latest, 25 April, happens next in 2038.

The Act that never came in

The Easter Act 1928 would fix Easter Day on the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April, a date between 9 and 15 April. It received Royal Assent, but it only comes into force by an order of the government after taking account of the views of the churches, and no such order has been made. The Act is still on the statute book, unused for almost a century.

The Easter bank holidays

Good Friday is a common-law holiday in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and is in the Scottish schedule of the 1971 Act. Easter Monday is a bank holiday in England, Wales and Northern Ireland but not in Scotland, where many councils give a local spring holiday instead. The Easter weekend gives four days off; four days of leave on the Tuesday to Friday after Easter Monday give ten. The bank holidays 2027 page lists every holiday of the year, and the Mother's Day and Pancake Day pages give the dates that depend on Easter.

Easter also moves the school calendar in many areas, since spring terms are often arranged around it, and it moves the clocks question too: in 2027, the clocks go forward in the early hours of Easter Sunday itself, so sunrise services start an hour later by the sun than the week before. Hot cross buns, simnel cake and chocolate eggs are on sale for weeks before, but the Sunday itself is quiet: most large shops are closed and public transport runs a Sunday service.