Easter monday

How it works

Easter Sunday is a movable feast. Western churches set it by an ecclesiastical moon table: the Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after 21 March. Easter Monday is simply the Monday attached to that Sunday. You do not calculate Monday on its own. You find Easter Sunday, then take the next day.

Because the Sunday moves, the Monday moves with it, always in spring on the Gregorian calendar used by civil Western dates, and always a Monday. It can fall in March or in April. It cannot fall in February. A calendar that pins “Easter Monday” to a fixed number, the way it pins Christmas to 25 December, is the wrong kind of calendar.

Orthodox Easter often lands on a different Sunday because it uses a different computus and, in many churches, the Julian calendar for the feast. Orthodox Easter Monday is the Monday after that other Sunday. If a country keeps both, the civil holiday usually follows the church the state actually observes. Do not assume a Western Monday and an Orthodox Monday are the same date.

Easter Monday is not a second Easter. It is the Monday that has to go somewhere after a Sunday that will not sit still.

Where it is a day off, and where it is not

England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland keep Easter Monday as a bank holiday. A large part of Europe and several other countries with a Christian civil calendar do the same: offices and banks close, and the long weekend starts on Good Friday for many workers and runs through Monday. The United States federal calendar does not list Easter Monday. Some cities run events that day. Federal offices, the Federal Reserve holiday list, and the Postal Service follow other dates.

Retail is mixed even where Monday is a holiday. A bank can be closed and a shopping street open. A school district can be on spring break that whole week, or only on Friday and Monday, or not at all. Read the local list. Copying a European bank-holiday assumption onto an American Monday is how a visitor finds a full workday and an empty “holiday” plan.

Find Easter Sunday for the church calendar you mean. Monday is the next civil day. That is Easter Monday. Check whether your country or province lists that Monday as a public holiday. Do not treat a United States federal calendar as if it closed for it.

Good Friday is the Friday before Easter Sunday and is a separate holiday where it is kept. Easter Monday does not drag Good Friday with it automatically in every jurisdiction. Some places close Friday and Monday. Some close only Monday. Some close neither. The Monday is one row on the table, not a three-day package unless the table says so.

Planning around a Monday that moves

If you need the date for a given year, look up Easter Sunday for that year on a calendar that states Western or Orthodox, then write the Monday. This page will not invent a year. A countdown that says “days until Easter Monday” is counting to that Monday after the Sunday is known. Change churches, and the countdown target changes.

Travel on Easter Monday in a country that closes for it looks like a Sunday with extra trains, extra family meals, and extra closed counters. Travel on Easter Monday in a country that does not close for it looks like an ordinary Monday that happens to follow Easter. Pack for the place, not for the name. Ferries, museums, and municipal desks follow the local holiday table, not the English phrase.

If you are writing a school or payroll calendar, pin the Monday after you pin the Sunday. Do not copy last year’s March or April number forward. The feast is famous for not repeating the same date. The weekday, though, is always Monday. That is the one part of the name you can trust without a table.