Easter sunday

How it works

Easter Sunday is a weekday rule first. The feast is defined as a Sunday. You will not find it on a Wednesday. What moves is which Sunday. Western churches take the Sunday after the first full moon on or after 21 March. That is why one year the date is late March and another year it is well into April.

For 2026 the Western date is Sunday 5 April. For 2027 it is Sunday 28 March. Copying last year's square onto this year's calendar is the usual error. The Sunday stays Sunday. The number on the square does not. Good Friday is the Friday before that Sunday. Easter Monday is the Monday after it. In 2026 those weekdays are 3 April and 6 April. They hitch to the Sunday. They do not wander off to a more convenient Friday.

Orthodox churches that follow the Julian paschalion can land on a different Sunday. In 2026 that date is Sunday 12 April, one week later. In some years the two Easters coincide. If a household keeps both, Easter Sunday is not automatically one shared morning. Name which calendar you mean before you book a table.

Take 21 March as the fence used in the Western computus. Find the first full moon on or after that date. Take the Sunday after that moon. That Sunday is Western Easter. You do not have to run the moon by hand. You do have to treat the answer as a Sunday. In the Northern Hemisphere that Sunday falls in spring. In the Southern Hemisphere it falls in autumn. The church's home season for the feast is spring. The weekday is Sunday wherever the civil week uses the same seven names.

Groceries open Easter Sunday

Whether groceries open Easter Sunday depends on the law of the place and on the shop's own notice. A Sunday that is also Easter is not an ordinary Sunday everywhere. In England and Wales, large shops — those with a retail floor over 280 square metres — must close on Easter Sunday under the Sunday Trading Act 1994. They must also close on Christmas Day. Smaller shops are not under that same Easter Sunday closure. Scotland does not use that English-and-Welsh Sunday trading frame; opening there is the shop's decision plus any local rule. Northern Ireland has its own Sunday trading law. Do not copy a London closure onto a Glasgow street, or a petrol-station fridge onto a superstore.

In the United States there is no federal rule that grocery stores must close on Easter Sunday. Some stores open, some cut hours, some close. The name on the fascia is not a national timetable. Read the hours for that date, for that branch. A card that says “Sunday 8 to 8” is ordinary Sunday talk. Easter can override it if the store published a holiday sheet.

Easter Sunday is still Sunday. Shops that shut are obeying a holiday rule, not inventing a new weekday. If you need milk that morning in England or Wales, assume a large supermarket is shut and look to a smaller shop, a station fridge, or Saturday's bag. If you need milk in a US suburb, assume nothing: check the door. The calendar names the Sunday. Only the shop names the lock.