Why Is Easter So Late This Year? April 20, 2025 Explained
Easter is this Sunday, April 20, 2025. That's super late! It feels odd to have Easter so late, right? Why isn't it on the same day each year, like Christmas? Well, it all has to do with the full moon and the spring equinox.
Easter 2025 is this Sunday, April 20. That’s super late. It feels odd to have Easter so late, right? Why isn’t it on the same day each year, like Christmas? Well, it all has to do with the full moon and the spring equinox.
Why does Easter’s date change each year?
The springtime celebration observes the day of Jesus Christ’s resurrection. This year, Christians will celebrate on Sunday, April 20, which is much later than 2021’s April 4 or 2008’s Easter, which fell on March 23.
Unlike Christmas, the celebration of Easter within the church does not adhere to a single date on the Calendar. Instead, it follows a time period. It will always fall on a Sunday between March 22 and April 25, which is a vast range for a holiday! So, what’s the actual pattern? Determining the date upon which Easter will fall actually has more to do with lunar cycles than the Earth’s rotation around the sun.
Scripture tells us about the events during the Easter Season — from the Last Supper to Jesus’s crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. Perhaps lesser known is that the Bible also tells us when to celebrate Easter. Scripture puts Jesus’s death after the Jewish Passover, celebrated on a full moon in spring. Because of this, early Christians decided to commemorate Jesus’s resurrection according to this Jewish calendar tradition.
Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the full moon, on or after the Northern Hemisphere’s vernal equinox (spring equinox). To standardize this, at the Council of Nicea (in 325 A.D.), the Western Church compiled information about lunar cycles into an ecclesiastical full moon table. It made March 21 the standard date of the vernal equinox.
The first ecclesiastical full moon after March 21st is the Paschal Full Moon, and Easter falls the following Sunday.
This year, a full moon occurred on March 14, so the first full moon after the equinox is much later, on April 13. Therefore, Easter is the following Sunday, April 20.
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Liza Graves
As CEO of StyleBlueprint, Liza also regularly writes for SB. Most of her writing is now found in the recipe archives as cooking is her stress relief!