Why the Easter break moves every year
Reviewed 2026-09-08 · TermMinder
Most school breaks stay roughly where they were last year. Christmas is Christmas, and half terms drift by a few days at most. Easter is different. The spring break moves from one year to the next, and the reason is older than the school system itself.
Easter follows the moon
The rule for finding Easter is written into British law. The Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 says that "Easter-Day is always the first Sunday after the first full moon which happens next after the one and twentieth day of March". Because it depends on a full moon rather than a fixed date, Easter moves from year to year.
You can see the effect in the official bank holidays list. In England and Wales, Good Friday is 3 April 2026 and Easter Monday is 6 April. A year later, Good Friday is 26 March 2027 and Easter Monday is 29 March. The whole weekend lands more than a week earlier, and the school holiday built around it has to move too.
Two ways to handle a moving target
In England, each local authority decides how to fit the break around the bank holidays. The two councils cited here, Kent and Edinburgh, take different approaches for 2026/27.
Kent wraps the break around the Easter weekend. Kent County Council lists Term 4 as ending on 25 March 2027 and Term 5 as starting on 12 April 2027, so Good Friday and Easter Monday both sit inside the gap between them.
Edinburgh takes the Easter bank holidays separately from its spring break. For 2026/27, Edinburgh has pupils off for Good Friday and Easter Monday, back on Tuesday 30 March, and then off again for the spring holiday from Monday 5 April to Monday 19 April. Same bank holidays, two quite different shapes of break.
Whichever approach your council takes, its published calendar is the only reliable source. GOV.UK's term dates finder takes a postcode and sends you to the right council page.
Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
Wales shares the England and Wales bank holidays, so Welsh councils face the same moving weekend.
Scotland has a twist. The bank holidays list shows Good Friday for Scotland but no Easter Monday. Edinburgh's 2026/27 calendar above is one council's arrangement, not a national rule, so check your own council's page.
In Northern Ireland, the Department of Education publishes a single list of non-operational dates. For 2026/27 the Easter holiday runs from 25 March to 2 April 2027, taking in Good Friday on 26 March and Easter Monday on 29 March. The same page notes that "schools can operate on these dates at their own discretion to suit their individual circumstances", so a school can still vary from the list.
What this means for planning
The moving Easter matters most when you are booking travel. Because the break moves with Easter, last year's dates are no help, and, as Kent and Edinburgh show, two councils can be off in different weeks. Book against the published calendar for the year you are travelling, not the one you remember.
Finally, the council's return date may not be your child's first day back. Kent's page says plainly that "term dates for some schools may be different" and asks parents to "contact your child's school to check staff training days". A training day pinned to the Tuesday after Easter is easy to miss if you only read the council table.
The safe habit is to treat Easter dates as information for this year only. Check the official calendar, and put the real dates into your diary rather than the remembered ones.
Use the finder to locate the authority calendar when it is available, then compare the published dates with the official source. You can save a calendar on this device or subscribe to its public ICS feed; configure alerts in your calendar app if you want a week-ahead or day-before prompt. Adding a public feed to a phone calendar keeps the dates beside your plans.