Religious Holiday Dates

Easter 2026 at a glance

Why Easter is on that date in 2026

Easter is the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon that falls on or after 21 March. In 2026 that full moon is 2 April, a Thursday, so the first Sunday after it is 5 April 2026, 3 days later.

The full moon in that rule is not the real one. It is an ecclesiastical full moon, taken from a fixed table that repeats every 19 years, which is why Easter can land a few days away from the moon you can actually see. The table is what makes the date computable centuries ahead instead of needing an observation.

Easter can only ever fall between 22 March and 25 April, a window of 35 days. In 2026 it is 14 days into that window, which is about average. Both ends are rare. The last 22 March was 1818 and the next is 2285; the last 25 April was 1943 and the next is 2038. Inside 1900 to 2100 the earliest Easter ever falls is 23 March, in 1913 and 2008.

Why Orthodox Easter is different

Most Orthodox churches apply the same rule in the Julian calendar, which currently runs 13 days behind the Gregorian one, and they use an older lunar table. Two differences, compounding, which is why the gap is sometimes nothing and sometimes more than a month.

That 13-day figure is not a constant, and this page does not treat it as one. It is computed from the two calendars for the year being displayed. It has been 13 days since 1900, and becomes 14 days in 2100. The same arithmetic is why Julian-calendar churches keep Christmas on what our calendar calls 7 January 2026: the date has not moved, the calendars have.

Easter dates, 2020 to 2050

Why a religious date is not always one date

Most calendars give you a single date for a religious holiday. For some observances that is correct. For a great many it is a simplification, and the simplification is where the errors are. There are four separate reasons, and they are different problems.

We handle all four the same way. We say which calendar we calculated in, we name the method, and where a date is genuinely disputed we say so rather than picking one and looking confident.

Islamic dates: calculated, announced, or sighted

This is where a single confident date is most often simply wrong. A lunar month begins with the new crescent, and there are three different ways a date gets fixed: calculated in advance, which is what almost every calendar on the web shows without saying so; announced by a national authority, often a day or two beforehand; or sighted locally, following a nearby authority. They do not always agree, and none of them is wrong.

The dates below are calculated, on the Umm al-Qura calendar, which is the civil calendar of Saudi Arabia and the basis most calculated Hijri dates use. Your local announcement may fall a day either side. If you are planning something that depends on the exact day, your local authority is the answer, not a website.

Islamic dates move about 10.9 days earlier each Gregorian year, because twelve lunar months come to 354.4 days against a mean Gregorian year of 365.2425. Over roughly 34 years an observance passes through every season. That figure is arithmetic from the mean synodic month, not a number we found somewhere.

Jewish dates: the day begins at sunset

In the Hebrew calendar a day runs from sunset to nightfall the following day, not from midnight to midnight. A holiday listed as falling on a date actually begins the evening before. Every row below gives both, because a calendar that shows only the civil date is wrong for exactly the hours in which the observance starts.

The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar. It holds months to the Moon and the year to the seasons by inserting a whole extra month, a second Adar, in 7 years out of every 19. That count is not quoted from anywhere: it is the number of leap years the calendar itself reports between 2026 and 2044. It is also why Jewish holidays move within a range of Gregorian dates rather than drifting steadily the way Islamic ones do.

Lunar New Year

Chinese New Year 2027 falls on Saturday 6 February 2027, beginning the year of the Fire Goat. The date is the first day of the first month of the Chinese lunisolar calendar, which starts on the day of a new moon in Beijing.

We compute it from the real new-moon instant rather than reading it from the platform's built-in calendar, because that calendar is a day out for some years: for 2027 it gives 7 February, when the new moon that starts the month falls at 23:56 Beijing time on the 6th. Four minutes decide the date. The official calendar, published by the Purple Mountain Observatory, has the 6th, and so do we.

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