What Is Easter? Date, History & Global Traditions in 2026

What is Easter?

Easter is the most important festival in the Christian calendar, commemorating the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth on the third day after his crucifixion. For more than two billion Christians worldwide it is the theological centrepiece of the year; for a far wider cultural audience it has also become a spring festival centred on family meals, decorated eggs, and the arrival of warmer weather in the Northern Hemisphere.

Unlike Christmas, Easter is a moveable feast: its date shifts each year because it is tied to the lunar cycle rather than a fixed calendar day. It is observed as a public holiday in more than 95 countries, and the surrounding Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter Monday are also recognised as official non-working days across much of Europe, Latin America, and the Commonwealth.

When is Easter 2026?

Western (Catholic and Protestant) Easter Sunday 2026 falls on Sunday, 5 April 2026. The surrounding observances are:

• Maundy Thursday: Thursday, 2 April 2026
• Good Friday: Friday, 3 April 2026
• Holy Saturday: Saturday, 4 April 2026
• Easter Sunday: Sunday, 5 April 2026
• Easter Monday: Monday, 6 April 2026

For Eastern Orthodox Christians — who follow a different calculation — Orthodox Easter (Pascha) 2026 falls on Sunday, 12 April 2026, exactly one week after Western Easter. Orthodox Good Friday is 10 April 2026 and Orthodox Easter Monday is 13 April 2026.

The four-day Easter weekend (Good Friday through Easter Monday) is one of the longest standard public holidays of the year in countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and most of continental Europe.

Why does the date change each year?

Easter's date is governed by a rule agreed at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, which sought to standardise the festival across the early Christian world. The rule, known as the Computus, states that:

Easter Sunday falls on the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after 21 March (the ecclesiastical date of the spring equinox).

A few subtleties follow from this definition:

• The ecclesiastical full moon is not the astronomical full moon. It is determined from a fixed table based on the 19-year Metonic cycle rather than direct observation of the sky, which means the calculated date can differ from the real lunar full moon by a day or two.
• The ecclesiastical equinox is fixed at 21 March, even though the astronomical equinox can fall on 19, 20, or 21 March.
• If the ecclesiastical full moon falls on a Sunday, Easter is the following Sunday, not that day itself — this prevents Easter from coinciding with the Jewish Passover.

For the computus in full — why Orthodox Easter usually falls on a different Sunday, the dates year by year, and the dozen holidays (Good Friday, Ascension, Whit Monday and more) that move with it — see why Easter's date changes every year.

The combined effect is that Western Easter can fall on any Sunday between 22 March (earliest) and 25 April (latest), a window of 35 possible dates. The earliest Easter in modern times occurred on 22 March 1818; the next will not happen until 2285. The latest, on 25 April, last occurred in 1943 and will next occur in 2038.

The difference between Western and Eastern Easter

Western and Eastern Christianity use the same underlying rule from Nicaea, but they apply it using different calendars and different lunar tables.

Because the Julian calendar is now 13 days behind the Gregorian, the Orthodox ecclesiastical equinox falls on what the rest of the world calls 3 April. The Orthodox calculation also uses the older lunar tables. As a result, Orthodox Easter is usually one to five weeks later than Western Easter, and very occasionally falls on the same Sunday.

The two traditions coincided in 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2017, and will next align in 2028, 2031, and 2034. In 2026 they are one week apart.

A long-running ecumenical proposal would fix Easter to the second Sunday of April for both traditions, but no agreement has been reached.

Easter around the world

Easter customs vary enormously between countries, blending Christian liturgy with older spring festivals.

United States and Canada

In North America, Easter is primarily a religious holiday for observant Christians and a secular spring celebration for everyone else. Children take part in Easter egg hunts organised by families, churches, and town councils — the White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn dates to 1878. The Easter Bunny, an import from German Lutheran tradition, brings baskets of chocolate eggs and candy on Easter Sunday morning. Easter Sunday is not a federal public holiday in the United States, since it always falls on a Sunday, and Good Friday is observed only in some states (notably Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas) and by financial markets.

United Kingdom and Ireland

Both Good Friday and Easter Monday are bank holidays in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Scotland observes Good Friday but not Easter Monday in most sectors. The traditional British Easter food is the hot cross bun, a spiced sweet roll marked with a cross and eaten on Good Friday. Sunday lunch typically features roast lamb. Children receive chocolate eggs, and many towns hold morris dancing displays and Easter parades.

Germany

Germany is the source of many traditions now considered universal. The Osterhase (Easter Hare) was first recorded in seventeenth-century writings from the Alsace and Palatinate regions, where it brought eggs to well-behaved children. Osterfeuer (Easter fires) are large bonfires lit on Holy Saturday evening, particularly in northern Germany, symbolising the end of winter and the light of the resurrection. Both Good Friday (Karfreitag) and Easter Monday (Ostermontag) are public holidays, and German law restricts dancing and loud public events on Good Friday.

Italy

In Italy, Easter (Pasqua) is second only to Christmas in religious importance. The Pope's Urbi et Orbi blessing from St Peter's Square in Rome draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. The traditional Easter cake is the Colomba di Pasqua, a dove-shaped sweet bread topped with pearl sugar and almonds, modelled on the panettone. Easter Monday, called Pasquetta ("Little Easter"), is a public holiday traditionally spent on a picnic or country outing.

Greece

Greek Orthodox Easter (Pascha, also called Lambri — "the bright day") is the most important religious festival of the year, larger even than Christmas. The week before is marked by candlelit processions, fasting, and the dyeing of eggs in deep red to symbolise the blood of Christ. At midnight on Holy Saturday, congregations leave their churches carrying lit candles to take the Holy Light home. The traditional Easter bread is tsoureki, a sweet braided loaf flavoured with mahlab and mastic, and the Easter Sunday meal is centred on a whole spit-roasted lamb.

Russia and Eastern Europe

In Russia, Ukraine, and other Orthodox countries, Easter (Paskha in Russian) is celebrated with two iconic foods: kulich, a tall cylindrical sweet bread topped with white icing, and paskha, a pyramid-shaped cheese dessert made from tvorog (curd cheese), butter, eggs, and dried fruit. Both are blessed at church on Holy Saturday. The Easter greeting "Khristos voskrese!" ("Christ is risen!") is answered with "Voistinu voskrese!" ("Truly, He is risen!").

Spain

Spain's Semana Santa (Holy Week) is one of the most elaborate religious observances in the world. Cities including Seville, Málaga, Valladolid, and Zamora host nightly processions in which religious brotherhoods (cofradías) carry floats (pasos) bearing statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary through the streets, accompanied by hooded penitents (nazarenos) and brass bands. Many of the processions date to the sixteenth century. Good Friday and Easter Monday (in some autonomous communities) are public holidays.

Brazil and Mexico

Brazil's Holy Week includes Procissão do Fogaréu in Goiás, a torchlit re-enactment of the search for Christ. Mexico's Semana Santa features dramatic Passion plays, the most famous being the staging in Iztapalapa, Mexico City, which has been held annually since 1843 and draws over a million spectators. Both countries close offices, schools, and many businesses from Maundy Thursday through Easter Sunday.

Australia and New Zealand

Easter falls in the Southern Hemisphere autumn. Good Friday, Easter Saturday, and Easter Monday are all public holidays. Australia has popularised the Easter Bilby — a campaign launched in the 1990s to raise awareness of the endangered native marsupial as an alternative to the introduced rabbit, which is considered an agricultural pest. Chocolate Easter Bilbies sold by major retailers fund conservation programmes.

Holy Week and related holidays

The week leading up to Easter Sunday — Holy Week — contains several distinct observances, some of which are public holidays in their own right.

Some countries observe a smaller subset: the United States recognises none of these as federal holidays, while Sweden, Finland, and Denmark observe four or five consecutive non-working days from Maundy Thursday through Easter Monday.

Easter date calculator

Because Easter's date depends on lunar and solar cycles, it has been calculated mathematically for centuries. The standard modern method is the Anonymous Gregorian algorithm, also known as the Computus, refined and popularised by the astronomer Jean Meeus. Given a year Y, it produces the month and day of Western Easter using only integer arithmetic.

The simplified outline of Meeus's algorithm is as follows:

1. Compute a = Y mod 19 (the position in the Metonic cycle).
2. Compute b = Y div 100 and c = Y mod 100.
3. Apply a series of corrections involving b and c to account for the Gregorian leap-year rules and the lunar drift correction.
4. The month is given by (h + L − 7m + 114) div 31 and the day by ((h + L − 7m + 114) mod 31) + 1, where h, L, and m are intermediate values from the previous steps.

The result is always a Sunday between 22 March and 25 April. Orthodox Easter uses the same structure but without the Gregorian leap-century corrections, producing a date in the Julian calendar that is then converted to Gregorian.

The algorithm is short enough to fit in a few lines of code in any programming language and is the foundation of every calendar application that displays Easter dates — including this one.

Countries where Easter is not a public holiday

Although Easter Sunday itself is a non-working day almost everywhere (because it is a Sunday), the surrounding holidays are far from universal.

• United States: Neither Good Friday nor Easter Monday is a federal public holiday. Good Friday is a state holiday in roughly a dozen states and is observed by stock exchanges and the bond market.
• Japan, China, South Korea, Vietnam: Easter has no official status, though it is observed by Christian minorities.
• Russia: Orthodox Easter is a culturally observed day but is not a federal non-working day; Easter Monday is a working day.
• Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and most Muslim-majority countries: Easter has no public-holiday status.
• Iceland and the Nordic countries: Easter Saturday is generally a working day (banks closed), unlike most of continental Europe.

Good Friday observance is the most variable. It is a public holiday in nearly all of Europe, the Commonwealth, and Latin America, but it is not federally recognised in the United States, most of Asia, or the Middle East.

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Key facts

Sources

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica, First Council of Nicaea — https://www.britannica.com/event/First-Council-of-Nicaea-325
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Computus — https://www.britannica.com/science/computus
3. U.S. Naval Observatory, Dates of Easter — https://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/easter