Easter Dates

This year, Easter Sunday is on April 12, which makes it a bit “later than usual”. The date of Easter is variable every year, according to a complex formula. Because of that complexity, you might have questions like:

How often does it fall on a particular date?
When is the latest or earliest Easter could be?
Does it fall on a certain date more often than others?

I was wondering about these questions over the past few weeks, and decided to write a web app to find out. The result is Easter Dates.

Frequency per Date

How often does Easter fall on each date? Turns out it’s evenly distributed between March 29 and April 20, with the extremes (early: near March 22; late: near April 25) falling off in frequency.

Easter is always on a Sunday and is based on the Paschal full moon. The full moon in question could be on any day of the week. So for Easter to be 3/22, the moon can only be on one day. For Easter to be 3/23 the moon can be one of two days, and so on until you get up to seven and then that’s the consistent (flat) section of dates. Then a similar explanation for the section at the end.

For a more complete explanation of the date of Easter and the distribution of dates, check out Computus on Wikipedia as well as “When is Easter?”.

Date Lookup

If you’re interested in a particular date that falls in the Easter or Lenten season (For example: your birthday), how often will that date fall within Lent, Easter, or the Easter season? I created a separate tool that allows you to type in your date and it will tell you. For example, if your birthday is March 31, 1985:

Easter Dates

Frequency per Date

Date Lookup

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