April — days, dates and countdowns

How to use April

The grid shows where the month's holidays fall this year, which matters more in April than in most months because the main ones move. Easter is not on a fixed date, so Good Friday and Easter Monday can land anywhere from late March to late April, dragging school holidays with them.

Use the working-day view when planning around it. April frequently loses two working days to a single Easter weekend, and in some years loses more to other public holidays clustered nearby.

Why Easter moves

Easter is calculated from a lunar rule rather than the solar calendar: it is set relative to the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. Because the lunar cycle does not divide evenly into the solar year, the date shifts substantially from year to year. Different Christian traditions calculate it using different calendars, which is why Eastern and Western Easter often fall on different Sundays.

The practical consequence is simple. Anything anchored to Easter — school terms, bank holidays, seasonal trade — moves by up to a month, and comparing "April this year" with "April last year" can compare a month containing the holiday with one that does not.

Any year-on-year April comparison should start by asking whether Easter was in the same month both times. Half of them aren't.

What else April carries

1 April — April Fools' Day, unofficial but reliably disruptive to anything published that morning. Tax year boundaries — the UK tax year begins in early April, and other countries start fiscal or academic years here too.

Spring school holidays — usually two weeks somewhere around Easter, so their dates move with it. Northern spring proper — the month when daylight gains are most noticeable in temperate latitudes. Southern autumn — mirror image below the equator, with the school year already well under way.

Thirty days, and the rhyme that gets it wrong

April is one of four 30-day months, alongside June, September and November. The old rhyme handles them fine but leaves February as an exception muttered at the end, which is roughly how the calendar itself treats it. The alternative memory trick — counting knuckles and gaps across your fists — gives the same answer and is harder to misremember at speed.

A 30-day month has a quiet effect worth knowing: it is not divisible into whole weeks, so no month of 30 days ever starts and ends on the same weekday. Whatever day the 1st falls on, the 30th is one day earlier in the week.

Planning an April that actually works

Look up Easter's date for the year before committing to any April schedule. Count the working days rather than assuming twenty-one or twenty-two. Publish nothing important on the morning of the 1st unless you want it read as a joke.

If a financial year changes hands this month, get anything needing the old year's paperwork done well before the boundary.