So you’re asking yourself “when is Easter this year?”
You’ve come to the right place! In 2025, it’s on Sunday, April 20!
Maybe you’re also wondering why it’s so complicated to figure out when Easter is? Because it is complicated! It can vary by over a month year-to-year. Why on earth is that? Well…it’s a “moveable feast”, meaning that it’s not a set date like Christmas or Valentine’s Day or St. Patrick’s Day or other holidays like that. It’s a little bit more like Thanksgiving, which isn’t on the same date every year, either. However, Thanksgiving is always the fourth Thursday of November, so it’s pretty easy to figure out just be looking at a calendar.
We determine when Easter is by calculating the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon, which is the first full moon appearing after the vernal equinox (which happens on April 13).
The date can move around quite a bit since it is based on the phases of the moon which isn’t perfectly synced to the 12 months of the year used in the West. However, it always occurs between March 22 and April 25.
While they’re not perfectly synced, the date for the Christian Easter is usually very close to the date of the Jewish Passover, which is also based on the Paschal Full Moon. Typically, Easter Sunday occurs right after the Jewish Passover. However, because the Jewish calendar is different than the Western one…and because every few years the Jewish calendar needs a kind of “leap month” to re-align it with the solar seasons, on some rare occasions, Passover is celebrated a full month after Easter Sunday.