The pink moon is April’s full moon. In 2026 it is full on Thursday 2 April 2026 at 3:12am BST.
Where the name comes from
Royal Museums Greenwich: Northern Native Americans call April's full moon the pink moon after a species of early blooming wildflower.
Their guide to the full moon names is where that wording comes from, read on 10 September 2026.
Pink Moon is a name for a month, then, not for a kind of moon.
What there is to see
The Moon does not turn pink. The name is a wildflower, not a colour forecast, and every April a fresh round of disappointed people find that out. What you will see is an ordinary full moon, which is not a small thing.
April full moons sit at a middling height, and the evenings are long enough that moonrise can catch you out: it is not properly dark until well after nine. The Moon comes up over the eastern horizon looking oversized, which is an illusion of the eye and the brain rather than the atmosphere, and it shrinks as it climbs without ever actually changing size.
What people get wrong about it
That it turns pink, which is the single most-searched wrong thing about any full moon. Every April the phrase trends and every April people photograph an ordinary white moon. The name is a wildflower, moss phlox, blooming in North America. Nothing about the light changes.
A note on searching for it: the plain phrase “pink moon” mostly returns Wikipedia and Spotify, for the Nick Drake album rather than anything astronomical. Adding the year is the quickest way past that.
Pink Moon dates
- 2026: Thursday 2 April 2026 at 3:12am (BST)
- 2027: Tuesday 20 April 2027 at 11:27pm (BST)
Times London local, from NASA. The 2027 row carries one source, not two. How these dates were checked.
Where this sits in the year
The pink moon is the fourth of the 13 full moons in 2026. The one before it is the Worm Moon on Tuesday 3 March 2026, and the one after is the Flower Moon on Friday 1 May 2026.
Full moon number 4 of 13 sits in the calendar with every date and London time. For what the Moon is doing on the nights either side of Thursday 2 April 2026 — waxing gibbous before, waning gibbous after — there is the eight phases of the Moon.
Why the date moves every year
The pink moon falls on Thursday 2 April 2026 in 2026 and Tuesday 20 April 2027 in 2027 — 384 days apart rather than 365. Twelve lunar cycles fall about eleven days short of the calendar year, which is why April’s moon keeps sliding earlier; run that far enough and a thirteenth moon has to be squeezed in, as 2026 does in May.
Our bias, stated: we sell moon and lunar wall art. None of it is a pink moon as such, because there is nothing to draw — the pink moon looks like every other full moon. What can be got wrong is the drawing itself, and pink moon or no pink moon, how to tell an accurate moon phase print is the checklist for that.
Written by Craig Fearn, Aphelion Prints. Last updated .
