How Many Days Until Easter?

Because Easter is tied to the moon, not to a fixed day of the calendar. The Catechism puts the rule in one sentence: at the Council of Nicaea in 325, all the Churches agreed that Easter should be celebrated on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox (CCC 1170). For the calendar, the equinox is fixed at March 21.

The rule exists because of Passover. Jesus died and rose at Passover, which Scripture sets by the moon: “In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month in the evening, is the LORD’s Passover” (Leviticus 23:5, WEB). St. Paul makes the link himself: “Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed in our place” (1 Corinthians 5:7). Keeping Easter on a Sunday near that full moon keeps the feast where the Gospels put it: on the first day of the week, at Passover.

It is worth being exact about what Nicaea did. What survives from the council on this question is the emperor Constantine’s letter to the churches, preserved by Eusebius (Life of Constantine III.18). The letter says the council resolved that the feast be kept “by all and in every place on one and the same day,” without depending on the Jewish calendar of the time. It does not quote a formula about equinoxes and full moons. The rule above is how the Church sums up that settlement and the Alexandrian tables that carried it out. The council settled that everyone would keep one Sunday; the arithmetic came afterwards.

The calculation has its own old name, the computus. It sounds harder than it is. Here it is for 2027, with the numbers this page uses:

1. Start at March 21, the Church’s fixed date for the spring equinox.
2. Find the paschal full moon: the first full moon on or after that day in the Church’s lunar table. 2027 is year 14 of the table’s 19-year cycle (its “golden number”), and in that year the moon falls 1 day later, on Monday, March 22.
3. Take the next Sunday. Easter is the first Sunday after that moon, never on it: Sunday, March 28.

The moon in step two is an ecclesiastical moon, read from a table rather than from the sky, so it can differ from an astronomical full moon by a day or two. That is intended. A table gives every diocese the same answer years in advance, and it is why this countdown can be printed on a parish calendar ten years out.

The 19-year cycle is the old observation that after nineteen years the moon’s phases fall on almost the same calendar days again. The table was corrected when Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar in 1582 (CCC 1170), and that reform is where East and West part ways.

Catholics and Orthodox use the same rule: the Sunday after the paschal full moon on or after March 21. They apply it on different calendars. The Catholic Church and most Western Christians reckon it on the Gregorian calendar. Most Orthodox Churches reckon it on the older Julian calendar, which now runs 13 days behind, and with the older lunar table. Their “March 21” therefore falls on April 3 of our calendar, and their moon is usually a few days later too.

In 2027 Western Easter is Sunday, March 28 and Orthodox Easter (Pascha) is Sunday, May 2, 5 weeks later. The gap is always a whole number of weeks, since both are Sundays. Across the 1900s and 2000s it is most often one week, fairly often none or five, and only rarely four. The next year both fall on the same Sunday is 2028; the last was 2025.

The Catechism notes that the Gregorian reform of 1582 “caused a discrepancy of several days” with the Eastern calendar, and that East and West are “seeking an agreement in order once again to celebrate the day of the Lord’s Resurrection on a common date” (CCC 1170). The table below shows both dates side by side for the coming decade.

Every date of Lent is counted back from Easter, so they all move with it. For Easter 2027:

• Ash Wednesday is 46 days before Easter: Wednesday, February 10. That is 116 days from today.
• Palm Sunday, which opens Holy Week, is the Sunday before: Sunday, March 21.
• Holy Thursday is Thursday, March 25. The evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper begins the Triduum.
• Good Friday is Friday, March 26, and the Easter Vigil is kept after nightfall on Holy Saturday.
• Pentecost, fifty days on, closes the Easter season: Sunday, May 16.

Why 46 days and not 40? Sundays are never fast days; each one is a small Easter. From Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday there are 46 days, and taking out the six Sundays leaves the traditional forty (40 in 2027). They echo Christ’s own fast: “When he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was hungry afterward” (Matthew 4:2).

By the Church’s own reckoning, the season of Lent runs “from Ash Wednesday until the Mass of the Lord’s Supper exclusive” (Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year, no. 28). So liturgically Lent ends on Holy Thursday evening, and the Triduum is its own season. On what Lent asks of you, see the Lent guide and the Ash Wednesday page. If you are choosing a practice, what to give up for Lent has ideas that go beyond chocolate.