April Fools' Day

April Fools’ Day is April 1 every year, so April Fools’ Day 2027 falls on a Thursday. It is an informal tradition of pranks and hoaxes, not a public holiday. Nobody knows exactly how it began. The earliest clear record is a Flemish poem from 1561, and the popular story about France changing its New Year’s Day does not fit the evidence well.

What April Fools’ Day Is

April Fools’ Day is a one-day license to fool people. The classic April fool is someone sent on a pointless errand or tricked into believing an obvious falsehood, and the prankster usually ends the joke by announcing it with “April Fools!”

The day has no legal status anywhere in the United States. It survives because people keep playing along: children trade tricks at school, families set up harmless pranks at home, and newspapers, broadcasters and companies publish elaborate fake stories. The best of those hoaxes have become part of media history.

April Fools’ Day History: What the Records Actually Show

The documented history is thinner than the stories told about it. Here is what the written record supports, in order:

• About 1392: an ambiguous line in Chaucer. In the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Chaucer sets the story at a date that some readers count as April 1. Most editors read it as May 3, and some scholars think the original manuscript said something different. The Museum of Hoaxes calls the line too ambiguous to count as evidence.
• 1508: the “April fish.” The French poet Eloy d’Amerval used the phrase poisson d’avril. It may refer to April 1 pranks, or it may simply mean a foolish person.
• 1561: the first clear reference. The Flemish poet Eduard de Dene wrote about a nobleman who sends his servant on a series of foolish errands on April 1. This is the earliest text that plainly describes April 1 pranks.
• 1686: the custom in Britain. The English antiquarian John Aubrey wrote of “Fooles holy day. We observe it on ye first of April.”
• 1698: an early English hoax. On April 1, a London newsletter reported that several people had been sent to the Tower of London to see the lions washed. No such ceremony existed, and the “washing of the lions” became a standard April 1 trick in London.

During the 18th century the custom spread throughout Britain.

Origin Theories That Don’t Hold Up

Several explanations circulate every spring. None of them is proven.

The French calendar change. The most repeated story says France moved the start of the year from spring to January 1 in the 1560s, under a decree by King Charles IX, and that people who kept celebrating the old new year around April 1 were mocked as “April fools.” The problems are serious. De Dene’s poem describing April 1 pranks dates from 1561, before the French change. The switch to January 1 happened gradually over about a century. And the Museum of Hoaxes notes that the old French new year had no obvious connection to April 1.

Roman Hilaria. Some writers link the day to Hilaria, a late-March Roman festival with costumes and mockery. The resemblance is loose, and no record connects the two.

Spring weather. Another theory ties the day to the vernal equinox and the way early spring weather “fools” people. It is an image, not evidence.

The honest conclusion is that April 1 pranks appear in the Low Countries and France by the 1500s, and in Britain by the late 1600s, without a single known starting point.

When Is April Fools’ Day? The April 1 Date Rule

The rule is fixed: April Fools’ Day is April 1 every year. It falls on a Thursday in 2027 and a Saturday in 2028; the leap day in February 2028 pushes the weekday forward two places instead of one. Because it is not a holiday, there is no observed day and nothing closes.

Two calendar facts make April 1 easy to work out:

• It always shares a weekday with July 1. April, May and June together contain 91 days, exactly 13 weeks, so April 1 and July 1 always fall on the same day of the week. In 2027 both are Thursdays, which you can check on the 2027 calendar.
• In leap years it matches January 1. January, February and March total 91 days in a leap year, so April 1 falls on the same weekday as New Year’s Day. In 2028 both are Saturdays.

April 1 also collides with religious holidays now and then. It was Easter Sunday in 2018 and will be again in 2029, an overlap you can see on the 2018 calendar. It fell on Good Friday in 1994. For working out any date’s weekday by hand, see how to find the day of the week.

Famous April Fools’ Day Hoaxes

Media hoaxes turned a schoolyard custom into a national event. A few that are still cited decades later:

Date	Outlet or prankster	The hoax
April 1, 1957	BBC, Panorama	Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from trees after the “spaghetti weevil” nearly vanished
April 1, 1974	Sitka, Alaska, prankster Porky Bickar	Burning tires in the crater of Mount Edgecumbe made residents think it was erupting
April 1985	Sports Illustrated	George Plimpton’s profile of Sidd Finch, a Mets rookie said to throw 168 mph
April 1, 1992	NPR, Talk of the Nation	Richard Nixon announcing a new run for president, voiced by impersonator Rich Little
April 1, 1996	Taco Bell	Full-page newspaper ads claiming the company had bought the Liberty Bell
April 1, 1998	Burger King	A “Left-Handed Whopper” for left-handed customers

The spaghetti broadcast set the pattern. Many viewers called the BBC asking how to grow their own spaghetti tree, and the BBC suggested placing a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hoping for the best. Plimpton hid a clue in the Sidd Finch story’s subheading, where the first letters of the words spelled out an April Fools’ message.

Real news can get caught in the crossfire. When Google announced Gmail on April 1, 2004, with 1 gigabyte of storage per inbox, many people assumed it was a joke.

How April Fools’ Day Is Observed Around the World

France and the April fish. French children try to tape a paper fish to someone’s back without being noticed, and the victim is a poisson d’avril. Chocolate fish are also given on April 1.

Scotland’s two-day version. Scotland traditionally stretched the day into two. April 1 was “hunting the gowk,” when people were sent on fake errands. The next day, Tailie Day, was for pranks such as pinning fake tails on unsuspecting victims.

Britain’s noon rule. In much of Britain, pranks are supposed to stop at noon on April 1. The folklorists Iona and Peter Opie recorded this rule among schoolchildren in the 1950s.

The United States. American custom is looser: jokes generally run all day, and the most visible pranks now come from companies and websites.

How the Day Has Changed

For most of its history, April Fools’ Day was personal: one person fooling another with an errand or a story. Newspapers, radio and television made it public in the 20th century, and the internet made corporate pranks an annual marketing ritual. That shift has limits. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Google canceled its April Fools’ jokes, and it did so again in 2021, a sign that a hoax depends on its moment. Like Halloween, the day has no legal status and lasts purely on custom.