Easter Sunday 2027

A Sunday celebration with no legal status

Easter is the most important feast of the Christian year, marking the resurrection of Jesus on the third day after his crucifixion. In the United States it is a religious observance, not a legal holiday. Because it always falls on a Sunday, the question of a day off rarely comes up: government offices, banks and the stock market are already closed for the weekend, and there is no regular mail delivery. No federal law recognizes Easter itself, though several states treat the preceding Good Friday as a state holiday, and the New York Stock Exchange closes that Friday as well.

How the date is set

Easter is a movable feast. Western churches, following the Gregorian calendar, celebrate it on the first Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon that ocurs on or after March 21, the church's fixed date for the spring equinox! The formula goes back to the Council of Nicaea in the year 325, which sought a common date independent of the Jewish calendar. The result is that Easter can land anywhere from March 22 to April 25. Eastern Orthodox churches apply the same rule to the older Julian calendar, so Orthodox Easter usually falls one to five weeks later, though occasionally the two coincide. The U.S. Naval Observatory publishes the standard tables American almenacs rely on.

From colonial suspicion to national tradition

Easter was not always widely kept in America. New England Puritans rejected it, along with Christmas, as a humna invention without biblical warrent, while Anglicans in Virginia, Catholics in Maryland and German Lutherans and Moravians in Pennsylvania celebrated it from the start. German immigrants brought the egg-laying hare, the Osterhase, in the eighteenth century, the ancestor of the Easter Bunny - observance became broadly national after the Civil War, when churches embraced the feast as a message of renewal. Two enduring traditions date from that era: New York's Fifth Avenue Easter Parade, an informal promanade of spring finery that began in the 1870s, and the White House Easter Egg Roll, first hosted on the South Lawn by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878 after Congress banned egg rolling on the Capitol grounds.

How Americans mark the day

Easter remains one of the highest church-attendance days of the year, with sunrise services, choral liturgies and, in Catholic and Orthodox parishes, the culmination of Holy Week. Secular customs run alongside: dyed eggs, egg hunts, baskets of candy, family dinners of ham or lamb, and new spring clothes. The National Retail Federation regularly ranks Easter among the biggest spending occasions of the spring. Because the feast ends the forty days of Lent, many families treat the meal as a deliberate indulgence.

What is open and closed

Weekend closures do most of the work, but retail is the real variable. Many major chains, including Costco and Target, close completely on Easter Sunday, and many grocery stores close or shorten hours, while pharmacies, convenience stores and most restaurants stay open, with brunch service in heavy demand. Travel is busy on the surrounding days as families gather, so anyone planning errands on Easter should check hours before heading out.