The next Easter Sunday is …. Here's the live count:
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Easter is the great mover of the calendar. Easter Sunday can fall on any date from March 22 to April 25, and the rule that sets it is ancient: Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon that falls on or after March 21, the date the church fixed for the spring equinox. This page works the date out with the traditional algorithm — the computus — for this year and next, and counts down to whichever Easter Sunday comes next. So if you're looking in autumn, you're seeing the run-up to next spring's Easter, which is exactly why the count can be surprisingly large.
Church leaders agreed the rule at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, and scholars spent centuries refining tables and formulas to apply it — the computus was once considered the pinnacle of mathematical astronomy. One subtlety surprises people: the "full moon" in the rule is an ecclesiastical full moon, read from church tables, not the astronomical one you see in the sky. The tables approximate the moon's cycle so well that the two usually agree, but they can differ by a day or two, which is why Easter occasionally lands a week away from where a quick glance at the real moon might suggest. The formula also fixes the equinox at March 21 even though the astronomical equinox can fall on March 19 or 20.
This page gives the Western date, used by Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and as the public holiday across Europe and the Americas. Orthodox churches apply the same rule but with the older Julian calendar and an additional requirement that Easter fall after Passover, so Orthodox Easter is often one, four, or five weeks later — though in some years the two coincide. Dates around Easter follow from it: Ash Wednesday is 46 days before Easter Sunday, Palm Sunday is one week before, and Good Friday is two days before.
Why does Easter move every year? Because it's tied to the moon as well as the week. The Sunday-after-the-full-moon rule means the date slides back and forth across a five-week window in spring, and rarely repeats exactly from one year to the next.
What are the earliest and latest possible Easters? The earliest is March 22 — last seen in 1818 and not due again until 2285. The latest is April 25, which last happened in 1943 and returns in 2038.