Lent 2027: Dates, Rules and a Lent That Actually Changes You

1. When Does Lent 2027 Start and End?

Lent 2027 starts on Ash Wednesday, 10 February 2027, and ends on the evening of Holy Thursday, 25 March 2027, when the Easter Triduum begins with the Mass of the Lord's Supper. Easter Sunday is 28 March 2027. Lent always begins forty-six days before Easter, so its date moves every year with Easter.

The Fridays of Lent 2027 are 12, 19 and 26 February, 5, 12 and 19 March, and Good Friday on 26 March. Because 25 March falls on Holy Thursday, the Solemnity of the Annunciation moves to Monday 5 April 2027. For the whole year at a glance, see our liturgical calendar for 2026-2027.

2. What Is Lent For?

Lent is the Church's forty-day season of repentance, preparing Christians to celebrate the death and Resurrection of Jesus at Easter. "By the solemn forty days of Lent the Church unites herself each year to the mystery of Jesus in the desert" (CCC 540). Jesus fasted forty days and was tempted by the devil (Matthew 4:1-11). Moses was forty days on the mountain, Elijah walked forty days to Horeb, and Israel wandered forty years. Forty is the Bible's number for testing and purification.

Lent also has a baptismal shape. In the early Church it was the final preparation of adults to be baptised at the Easter Vigil, and the rest of the Church walked alongside them. Today adults still enter the Church at Easter, and every Catholic renews their baptismal promises that night. Lent asks you a direct question: if you renewed your baptism today, would you mean it?

Here is the hard thing. Lent is a fight. It is forty days of going after the sins you have made peace with, the habits that own you, and the prayer you keep postponing. The first words spoken over you on Ash Wednesday may be "Repent, and believe in the Gospel" (Mark 1:15). The alternative is "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19). Both are true. You will die, and no one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32). This could be your last Lent. Live it like it is.

3. What Are the Rules for Lent?

The rules for Lent in the Latin Catholic Church are short. Catholics aged 18 until their 59th birthday fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and everyone from age 14 abstains from meat on Ash Wednesday, Good Friday and every Friday of Lent (canons 1250-1252). Fasting means one full meal and two smaller meals that together do not equal a full meal, with nothing in between. The sick, pregnant and nursing women and others with a real medical reason are excused.

That is the minimum. The legal minimum for the whole season is two fast days and seven meatless Fridays. If that is your entire Lent, you have kept the law and missed the point. Our full guide to Catholic fasting rules, abstinence and meat on Friday covers the exact ages, what counts as meat, the exemptions, Eastern Catholic practice and whether eating meat on a Friday is a sin.

• Is Ash Wednesday a holy day of obligation? No. Go to Mass anyway, and receive ashes.
• Can non-Catholics receive ashes? Yes. Ashes are a sacramental, a sign of repentance, open to anyone who wants to repent.
• Do I have to keep my ashes on all day? No rule requires it. Most Catholics do, as a quiet witness.

4. What Are the Three Practices of Lent?

The three practices of Lent are prayer, fasting and almsgiving. They come straight from the Gospel read on Ash Wednesday, where Jesus says "when you give alms", "when you pray" and "when you fast" (Matthew 6:1-18). Note the word "when." He assumes his disciples will do all three. The Catechism calls them the three forms of interior penance, expressing conversion "in relation to oneself, to God, and to others" (CCC 1434).

Prayer: turning back to God

Lenten prayer means more time with God, at a fixed hour, every day. Fifteen minutes in the morning beats an hour you never get to. Add one weekday Mass, read the Sunday Gospel in advance, or pray the Stations on Fridays.

Fasting: mastering the body

Fasting trains the will by saying no to good things so you can say no to bad ones. "I pommel my body and subdue it," St. Paul wrote (1 Corinthians 9:27). Jesus said his disciples would fast once the bridegroom was taken away (Mark 2:20). Hunger also makes you honest about how much comfort you take from food, screens and drink.

Almsgiving: turning to your neighbour

Almsgiving means giving to the poor what you saved by fasting, and then some. Isaiah gives God's own definition of a fast: "to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house" (Isaiah 58:6-7). A Lent that saves you money and gives none of it away has become a diet.

All three must be done in secret, Jesus says, "and your Father who sees in secret will reward you" (Matthew 6:4). Skip the Lenten announcement on social media.

5. What Should You Give Up for Lent?

Give up the thing that has a grip on you. That is the honest test. If you could give it up tomorrow without noticing, it is the wrong sacrifice. If the thought of forty days without it makes you anxious, you have probably found the right one.

Chocolate is fine for a seven-year-old. For an adult, a chocolate-only Lent is a way to feel religious while leaving every real sin untouched. If your phone, your drinking, your temper or your porn habit owns you, and you give up biscuits, you have negotiated with God and offered him your loose change. Go after the real thing.

Ideas with teeth

• Your phone after 9pm. Charge it outside the bedroom for forty days. Delete the app that eats your evenings. See our guide to screen addiction.
• Alcohol. All of it, for forty days. If that scares you, that is information. Read drinking and the Catholic faith and take the free quiz.
• Pornography and masturbation. Make Lent the start of real freedom. Start with our guide to quitting pornography and its free quiz.
• Gambling, betting apps and loot boxes. See gambling and how to quit.
• Vaping, nicotine and weed. See marijuana, smoking and vaping.
• Complaining and gossip. Every complaint costs you a decade of the rosary. See gossip and detraction.
• The snooze button. Get up at the first alarm and give God the first ten minutes.
• Streaming and doom-scrolling on weeknights. Replace it with reading, a walk or a conversation.
• Impulse spending. Buy nothing but necessities for forty days and give the difference away.
• Snacking between meals on top of one serious food sacrifice, if food really is your weakness. See overcoming gluttony.

6. What Should You Take On for Lent?

Take on one daily prayer and one act of generosity. Giving something up makes room. Taking something on fills it. Here are concrete options.

Prayer

• Fifteen minutes with the day's Gospel each morning, using the method in our guide on how to pray.
• One weekday Mass a week, on top of Sunday.
• A daily rosary, or one decade if a full rosary would break you.
• The Stations of the Cross every Friday (see below).
• Night prayer before bed in place of the phone.
• Read one Gospel cover to cover. Mark takes about two hours in total.

Almsgiving and mercy

• Give what you save on coffee, drink or takeaways through a Lenten appeal: Catholic Relief Services' Rice Bowl in the United States, CAFOD in England and Wales, Trócaire in Ireland, or Caritas Australia's Project Compassion.
• Visit someone lonely once a week: a grandparent, a neighbour, a care home resident.
• Phone the person you have been avoiding and make peace.
• Pay a debt you have been dodging.
• Give time to your parish's food bank or St. Vincent de Paul Society. See St. Vincent de Paul.

Not sure what God is asking? Use our free prayer generator to write a prayer for your Lent, or ask a question with Ask.

7. How Do You Build a Lent Plan You Will Keep?

Build your Lent plan before Ash Wednesday, write it down and tell one person. Lents fail for predictable reasons: they are vague, they are too big, they are secret, and they have no plan for failure. Fix all four.

1. Before 10 February, sit down for twenty minutes and ask: what habit most keeps me from God and from the people I love? Write the answer.
2. Make it specific. "Pray more" is a wish. "Fifteen minutes of Scripture at 6.45am before I touch my phone" is a plan.
3. Pick one big and one small sacrifice, plus one prayer and one act of almsgiving. Stop there.
4. Tell one person: your spouse, a friend, your confessor. Ask them to check in each Sunday.
5. Plan for failure. Decide now: when I break it, I get up the same day, confess if needed and carry on. A broken Lent restarted is still a Lent.
6. Review each Sunday. Ten minutes: what went well, where did I fall, what will I change this week?
7. Book confession for the first and the last weeks of Lent now.

8. Do Sundays Count in Lent?

Sundays are part of Lent but they are never days of fasting, and the Church has no rule about whether your personal sacrifice applies on Sundays. Liturgically, the Sundays are "Sundays of Lent": the priest wears violet, the Gloria and the Alleluia are silent, and the readings are Lenten. Canonically, the penitential days are the Fridays of the year and the season of Lent (canon 1250), and every Sunday remains a little Easter, a weekly celebration of the Resurrection.

The famous count works like this. From Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday is forty-six days. Take away the six Sundays and you get forty days of fasting. Liturgically, Lent itself now ends on Holy Thursday evening, which gives forty-four days, but the old count of forty fasting days still explains why Sundays are left out.

So can you eat the chocolate on Sunday? The Church leaves your private resolutions to you. Our advice is blunt: decide before Ash Wednesday, and do not invent the Sunday exemption on the first Sunday you feel weak. If your sacrifice targets a sin or an addiction, such as pornography, drunkenness or gambling, there is no day off, because sin never had a day on. If it is a good thing you are giving up for discipline, such as sweets or a favourite show, enjoying it on Sundays is a fine way to mark the Resurrection.

9. How Do You Make a Good Lenten Confession?

Make a thorough confession early in Lent and another in Holy Week. Lent is the Church's season of reconciliation, and most parishes add extra confession times, a parish penance service and sometimes whole evenings when every church in a diocese hears confessions. In many US dioceses these run on Wednesday evenings in Lent under names such as "The Light Is On for You." Pope Francis began "24 Hours for the Lord" in 2014, a day and night of confession around the Fourth Sunday of Lent; check whether your diocese keeps it.

The Church requires Catholics to confess grave sins at least once a year (canon 989) and to receive Holy Communion at least once a year in the Easter season (canon 920). That second rule is called the Easter duty. In the United States the period runs from the First Sunday of Lent to Trinity Sunday. If it has been years, Lent is your moment.

1. Set aside thirty minutes in the first week of Lent to examine your conscience thoroughly, going back to your last good confession.
2. Use a full examination of conscience. Our guide on how to go to confession step by step includes one.
3. Go to a priest you do not know if shame is stopping you. Go to the penance service if a queue makes it easier.
4. Confess the habit you are fighting this Lent by name. Ask the priest for one piece of advice on it.
5. Go again in Holy Week, so you enter the Triduum clean.

If you torment yourself with doubt about whether you confessed properly, read our guide to scrupulosity before Lent. Fear is a poor confessor. Christ is waiting with mercy.

10. How Do You Pray the Stations of the Cross?

The Stations of the Cross, or Way of the Cross, is a devotion in which you walk with Jesus from his condemnation to his burial, stopping at fourteen stations to meditate on his Passion. Most parishes pray them publicly on Fridays in Lent, and the fourteen crosses or images on the walls of your church are there for it. You can pray them alone, at any time.

The devotion grew from pilgrims who walked the path of Christ's Passion in Jerusalem. Franciscans, the custodians of the holy places, spread it to Europe so that Christians who could never travel there could walk it at home. St. Leonard of Port Maurice, an eighteenth-century Franciscan, set up the Way of the Cross in hundreds of places, including the Colosseum in Rome. By then the number had settled at fourteen.

The fourteen traditional stations

1. Jesus is condemned to death.
2. Jesus takes up his cross.
3. Jesus falls the first time.
4. Jesus meets his mother.
5. Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the cross.
6. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus.
7. Jesus falls the second time.
8. Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem.
9. Jesus falls the third time.
10. Jesus is stripped of his garments.
11. Jesus is nailed to the cross.
12. Jesus dies on the cross.
13. Jesus is taken down from the cross.
14. Jesus is laid in the tomb.

St. John Paul II also prayed a Scriptural Way of the Cross at the Colosseum on Good Friday 1991, with every station taken directly from the Gospels, beginning with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Either form is good.

How to pray them

1. Begin with an act of contrition.
2. At each station, say: "We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world."
3. Read the scene or a short meditation, and stay with it for a minute. Ask what this moment says about your own sins and sufferings.
4. Pray an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Glory Be, and move to the next station.
5. Finish with prayer for the Pope's intentions.

The Church grants a plenary indulgence for devoutly making the Way of the Cross at legitimately erected stations, moving from station to station and meditating on the Passion, under the usual conditions of confession, Communion, prayer for the Pope's intentions and detachment from sin.

11. What Happens in Holy Week and the Triduum?

Holy Week is the last week of Lent, from Palm Sunday to Holy Saturday, and its final three days, the Easter Triduum, are the high point of the whole Church year. In 2027 Holy Week runs from Sunday 21 March to Saturday 27 March.

• Palm Sunday, 21 March. Palms are blessed, the crowd shouts "Hosanna", and then the whole Passion is read. The same crowd will shout "Crucify him." So will you, every time you sin.
• Monday to Wednesday. The final weekdays of Lent. Wednesday is sometimes called Spy Wednesday, after Judas' bargain (Matthew 26:14-16). In many dioceses the bishop celebrates the Chrism Mass this week, blessing the holy oils used for baptism, confirmation and anointing of the sick.
• Holy Thursday, 25 March. Lent ends. The Triduum begins with the evening Mass of the Lord's Supper: the institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood, and the washing of feet (John 13). Afterwards the Blessed Sacrament is moved to an altar of repose. Stay and watch an hour with him (Matthew 26:40).
• Good Friday, 26 March. A day of fast and abstinence. No Mass is celebrated anywhere in the world. The Celebration of the Lord's Passion includes the Passion according to John, the great intercessions, the veneration of the Cross and Holy Communion. Many keep silence from noon to 3pm.
• Holy Saturday, 27 March. The Church waits at the tomb. The Second Vatican Council asked that the paschal fast of Good Friday be prolonged through Holy Saturday where possible (Sacrosanctum Concilium 110).
• The Easter Vigil, the night of 27 March. The new fire, the Easter candle, the Exsultet, the long history of salvation in readings, baptisms and confirmations of new Catholics, and the first Alleluia since Ash Wednesday.
• Easter Sunday, 28 March 2027. Christ is risen. Easter is a fifty-day season, so feast like it.

Go to all three days of the Triduum this year. It costs you about six hours. Nothing else in the Church year comes close.

12. Do Other Christians Keep Lent?

Many do, in different ways.

• Eastern Orthodox Christians keep Great Lent, which begins on Clean Monday and follows a far stricter fast than the Latin Church: traditionally no meat, dairy, eggs or fish on most days, and on many days no wine or oil. In 2027 Orthodox Easter (Pascha) falls on 2 May, so Great Lent begins on 15 March. See the Eastern Orthodox Church.
• Eastern Catholics follow the Lenten discipline of their own Church, often close to Orthodox practice. See the Eastern Catholic Churches.
• Anglicans, Lutherans and Methodists widely keep Ash Wednesday and Lent, with ashes, Lenten disciplines and Holy Week services.
• Many evangelicals, Baptists and Pentecostals have traditionally skipped Lent, citing Jesus' warnings about showy fasting (Matthew 6:16-18) and Paul's warning against man-made rules about food and days (Colossians 2:16-23). In recent decades more evangelical churches have taken it up.

The Catholic reply is simple. Jesus said "when you fast", and the apostles fasted (Acts 13:2-3). Colossians warns against treating food rules as the source of salvation. The Church agrees: Lent saves no one. Christ saves. Lent clears the ground so his grace can work. For the broader comparison, see Catholic and Protestant beliefs compared.

13. What If Lent Makes Things Worse?

If Lent is feeding anxiety, scruples, an eating disorder or despair, change your Lent, today. The Church's penances exist to heal you, body and mind.

• Eating disorders. If you have ever struggled with anorexia, bulimia or binge eating, do not fast from food in Lent. You are excused. Talk to your doctor and choose a different sacrifice, such as your phone or your free evenings.
• Medical conditions. Diabetes, pregnancy, breastfeeding, recovery from surgery and many medications all excuse you from fasting. Never stop or skip medicine for Lent.
• Scrupulosity. If you spend Lent terrified that you broke the fast with a mint, you need a confessor's guidance more than a stricter Lent. Read our guide to scrupulosity.
• Despair. If you fail badly, that is no proof that God has given up on you. Get up, go to confession, and start again the same day. See our guide to finding hope in despair.