Easter 2027

Easter has no fixed place on the calendar. It can fall on any Sunday from March 22 to April 25, and each year's date comes from a calculation that combines the calendar with a table of church full moons. For 2027 that calculation produces Sunday, March 28, near the early end of the range. This page explains the rule, works through the 2027 computation and lists the dates that move with Easter. To count down to a different date, use the Countdown Calculator; to add or subtract days from Easter, the Date Calculator.

How the date of Easter is set

The U.S. Naval Observatory states the rule this way: Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after March 21. Two details make that different from looking at the sky. The ecclesiastical full moon comes from tables rather than from astronomy, so it keeps roughly in step with the real Moon but can miss it by a day or more. And the spring equinox is fixed at March 21 by rule, even though the astronomical equinox moves slightly from year to year. Western churches use the tables issued with the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582; most Orthodox churches use older tables tied to the Julian calendar.

Because the full moon can fall anywhere in a 29-day window after March 21, and Easter is the Sunday after it, the earliest possible Easter is March 22 and the latest is April 25. Both extremes are rare: Easter last fell on March 22 in 1818 and will not again until 2285, and it last fell on April 25 in 1943, with the next one in 2038.

Worked example: computing Easter 2027

The Anonymous Gregorian algorithm turns the church tables into integer arithmetic. Every division keeps only the whole-number quotient, and "mod" is the remainder. For the year 2027:

Month 3, day 28: March 28, 2027. The intermediate values have a meaning. The value a places 2027 in the 19-year lunar cycle, and h counts the days from March 21 to the ecclesiastical full moon: h = 1 puts it on Monday, March 22. The value l counts the extra days to the following Sunday, so Easter falls l + 1 = 6 days after the full moon. The correction m is almost always 0 and only matters in a few late-moon years. In 2027 the table moon agrees with the sky: the Naval Observatory puts the astronomical full moon at 10:44 UT on March 22, two days after the March equinox.

Easter 2027 and the dates that depend on it

Most of the spring church calendar is measured from Easter Sunday. The offsets below are the standard ones; the Naval Observatory publishes the same offsets for Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Ascension, Pentecost and Trinity Sunday.

Two fixed dates fall inside this stretch in 2027: Valentine's Day, on Sunday, February 14, is the first Sunday of Lent, and St. Patrick's Day, Wednesday, March 17, falls in the week after the fifth Sunday of Lent. Daylight saving time begins on March 14, two weeks before Easter.

Easter dates from 2023 to 2032

Every date in this table comes from the same algorithm as the worked example and matches the Naval Observatory for the Western dates. The Orthodox column follows the Julian computus.

Notice how the dates jump. From one year to the next, Easter moves either 8, 9, 15 or 16 days earlier or 12, 13, 19 or 20 days later, because the church moon falls about 11 days earlier each year and jumps a month later whenever it would land before March 21. 2027 and 2032 share the same Western and Orthodox dates.

Why 2027 is an early Easter

Across the whole century from 2000 to 2099, Easter falls in March only 22 times and in April the other 78. March 28 is one of the rarer dates: it occurs only in 2027 and 2032. The years around 2027 show how unusual it is. Easter was later in every year from 2017 through 2026, with the earliest of them on March 31, 2024, and after 2032 the next earlier Easter is March 25, 2035. The earliest Easter of this century was March 23, 2008, and the latest will be April 25, 2038.

Orthodox Easter 2027

Orthodox churches celebrate Pascha on Sunday, May 2, 2027, 35 days after the Western date. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America explains that the Orthodox Church still bases its calculation on the Julian calendar used at the time of the First Ecumenical Council in 325. The Julian calendar now runs 13 days behind the Gregorian one, and its lunar tables have drifted as well. Across the two centuries from 1900 to 2099, Orthodox Easter comes one week after Western Easter in 91 years, four or five weeks after it in 52, and on the same Sunday in 57. 2025 and 2028 are both shared Easters, with the 2028 date on April 16.

What is open on Good Friday and Easter

Neither Good Friday nor Easter Monday is a federal holiday, and Easter itself always falls on a Sunday. On Good Friday, March 26, 2027, federal offices, Federal Reserve Banks and post offices operate normally, but the New York Stock Exchange is closed: Good Friday is the one NYSE holiday that is not also a federal holiday. A few states treat Good Friday as a legal holiday under their own laws; Louisiana, for example, lists it alongside Mardi Gras. Easter Monday, March 29, is a regular workday in the United States. The Federal Holidays 2027 page covers the full closing calendar.

Sources

• U.S. Naval Observatory: The Date of Easter and Selected Christian Observances (Easter and related dates, 2015 to 2037).
• U.S. Naval Observatory: Phases of the Moon and Earth's Seasons (March 2027 full moon and equinox).
• Orthodox Church in America: Lenten and Paschal Cycle; Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America: Dating Pascha in the Orthodox Church.
• New York Stock Exchange: Holidays and Trading Hours (Good Friday, March 26, 2027).
• Louisiana State Legislature: R.S. 1:55, Days of public rest and legal holidays (Good Friday and Mardi Gras).
• The White House: The White House Easter Egg Roll.
• Jean Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms, 2nd edition (1998): the integer Easter algorithm used in the worked example.