Countdown
Pick a holiday or your own date, and the time counts down second by second.
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How it works
The countdown runs against your own clock and time zone. Holidays count to midnight as the day begins, and once one has passed the count moves on to next year.
Easter moves between 22 March and 25 April and is worked out with the church’s rule: the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, which the church fixes at 21 March.
A date of your own is saved in the address. Copy the link and the person you send it to sees the same countdown, measured against their own clock.
Days are counted as whole periods of 24 hours, so the night the clocks change shows one hour more or less in the hours, but never a wrong number of days.
How the tool counts
The countdown updates four times a second, and each part of the time left is rounded down, so the seconds only change once a full second has passed.
A date and time of your own are read in the browser’s local time, with the time set to midnight unless you change it. The link stores the date and time without a time zone, so whoever opens it counts down to the same clock time in their own zone. A meeting at 6pm in London becomes, for someone opening the link in Stockholm, a countdown to 6pm there, which is an hour before the meeting.
A time that does not exist is moved forward. In the early hours of Sunday 28 March 2027 the UK clocks go from 1am to 2am, and a target of 1:30am that night becomes 2:30am in the browser.
Example
From midday on Thursday 1 October 2026 to the start of Christmas Day, midnight on 25 December, the countdown shows 84 days and 13 hours. By the calendar it is 84 days and 12 hours, but under the Summer Time Order 2002 summer time ends at 1am GMT on Sunday 25 October, and that extra hour is counted. The same applies to Bonfire Night: from midday on 1 October it is 34 days and 13 hours to the start of 5 November.
The date of Easter
The tool works out Easter Day with Meeus’s algorithm for the Gregorian Easter rule, which gives 28 March 2027. The Easter Act 1928 would have fixed Easter Day as the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April, but it has never been brought into force, and legislation.gov.uk still lists it as prospective. Under it, Easter Day 2027 would be 11 April, two weeks later than it is.