Easter Date Calculator — Western and Orthodox Easter for Any Year

Orthodox Easter and Western Easter dates for any year

This free Easter date calculator gives the date of Orthodox Easter (Pascha) and Western Easter for any year from 1583 to 4099. Type a year — or step through them with the arrows — and both Sundays appear at once, with the Julian-calendar date the Orthodox churches use, how far apart the two Easters are, and a countdown.

Below the dates is a table of the movable feasts that hang on Easter: Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Mothering Sunday, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Ascension, Pentecost and more for Western churches, and Clean Monday, Lazarus Saturday, Holy Friday, Thomas Sunday and Pentecost for the Orthodox. A second table lists both Easters for the next 20 years, ready to download as CSV.

How to use the Easter Date Calculator

1. Enter the Year, or press This year; the arrow buttons move a year back or forward.
2. Read Western Easter and Orthodox Easter in the two boxes, with the countdown underneath.
3. Switch the feast table between Western and Orthodox to see Lent, Holy Week, Ascension and Pentecost.
4. Check the 20-year table, then press Download CSV or Copy dates.

Easter Date Calculator features

How the date of Easter is calculated

Easter is the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon — the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after 21 March. The full moon here is not the real Moon in the sky but a date from a 19-year table (the golden number), a rule settled long before modern astronomy. Western Easter therefore falls between 22 March and 25 April.

Western churches follow the Gregorian reform of 1582, which corrected both the calendar and the lunar table. The calculator uses the “Anonymous Gregorian algorithm” published by Jean Meeus in Astronomical Algorithms, which is exact for every Gregorian year. Most Orthodox churches kept the older Julian computus: the same idea, but with the uncorrected table and with 21 March counted in the Julian calendar, which runs 13 days behind the Gregorian one this century (14 days from March 2100). That is why Orthodox Easter is usually one or five weeks later, and sometimes the same day.

Movable feasts and local customs

Ash Wednesday is 46 days before Easter (40 days of Lent without the Sundays), Shrove Tuesday — Pancake Day in the UK — the day before, and Mothering Sunday in the UK and Ireland three weeks before Easter. Ascension is the 40th day counting Easter as day one, so a Thursday 39 days later, and Pentecost the 50th day. Some countries and dioceses move Ascension or Corpus Christi to the following Sunday; the table shows the traditional weekday.

For the Orthodox, Great Lent begins on Clean Monday, 48 days before Pascha. Old-calendar churches (Jerusalem, Russia, Serbia, Georgia, Mount Athos) keep fixed feasts in the Julian calendar too, so Christmas falls on 7 January; new-calendar churches (Greece, Romania, Bulgaria) keep fixed feasts by the Gregorian calendar but Pascha by the Julian rule. The Finnish Orthodox Church celebrates Easter on the Western date.

For the Jewish calendar see the Hebrew date converter, to plan Lenten reading the Bible reading plan generator, and for any weekday the day of the week calculator.