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How many days until Easter?
Easter falls on ….
Counted in your own time zone, —.
Easter Sunday moves every year. The counter above is computed for the correct date rather than looked up, so it stays right in any year.
The date that has to be calculated
Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, which places it anywhere between 22 March and 25 April — a window of more than a month. That is why a countdown to Easter cannot simply be pinned to a date the way Christmas can: it has to be worked out from the calendar and the moon.
Why it moves at all
The rule was set at the Council of Nicaea in 325 to tie Easter to the lunar calendar of Passover while keeping it on a Sunday. The formula used to compute it is called the computus, and calculating it correctly was one of the hardest arithmetic problems in medieval Europe. This page runs the modern version of that algorithm.
Everything else moves with it
Because Easter moves, so does everything anchored to it: Lent begins 46 days before, Good Friday is two days before, Easter Monday the day after, and in many countries the school holidays shift by weeks as a result. A countdown to Easter is usually really a countdown to a fortnight off, and its date changes every year.
Questions
Why does Easter change date every year?
It is set by a lunar rule — the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox — so it falls between 22 March and 25 April.
Is this the Western or Orthodox date?
Western. Orthodox Easter uses the Julian calendar for the same rule and usually falls later, sometimes by several weeks.
How is the date worked out?
By the anonymous Gregorian computus, the standard algorithm for Easter. This page computes it rather than reading it from a list, so it cannot go out of date.