Mardi Gras Dates

"Mardi Gras" (French for Fat Tuesday) is the day before Ash Wednesday. Mardi Gras is the final day of Carnival, the three day period preceding the beginning of Lent, the Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday immediately before Ash Wednesday (some traditions count Carnival as the entire period of time between Epiphany or Twelfth Night and Ash Wednesday). The entire three day period has now come to be known in many areas as Mardi Gras. Perhaps the cities most famous for their Mardi Gras celebrations include New Orleans, Louisiana; Mobile, Alabama and Sydney, Australia. Many other places have important Fat Tuesday celebrations as well. Carnival is an important celebration in most of Europe, except in the United Kingdom where pancakes are the tradition, and also in many parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.

New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations draw hundreds of thousands of tourists to the city in addition to the celebrating locals for the parties and parades. The starting date of festivities in New Orleans is March 3, 1699, when a group of French explorers set up camp on the west bank of the Mississippi River, about 60 miles downriver from the site that would become New Orleans. Since that day just happened to be Mardi Gras, a major event on the French calendar, the group's leader, Pierre Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville dubbed the spot, in the spelling of the time, La Pointe du Mardy Gras. The Rex organization put a marker at the Louisiana site 300 years later. An account from 1743 notes that the custom of Carnival balls was already established by that date (during the time Bienville was still governor). Processions and masking in the streets on Mardi Gras Day took place, and were sometimes prohibited by law, but were quickly renewed whenever such restrictions were lifted or enforcement waned. In 1833, Bernard Xavier de Marigny de Mandeville, a rich plantation owner, raised the money to fund an official Mardi Gras celebration. On Mardi Gras of 1857 the Mistick Krewe of Comus held its first parade. Comus is the oldest continuously active Mardi Gras organization and started a number of continuing traditions (for example, the use of floats in parades) and is considered the first Carnival krewe in the modern sense. In 1875 Mardi Gras was declared a legal holiday by the state of Louisiana. War, economic, political, and weather conditions sometimes led to cancellation of some or all major parades, especially during the American Civil War, World War I and World War II, but celebration of Carnival has always been observed in the city.

1972 was the last year in which large parades went though the narrow streets of the city's old French Quarter neighborhood; larger floats and crowds and safety concerns led the city government to prohibit big parades in the Quarter. In 1991 the New Orleans city council passed an ordinance that required social organizations, including Mardi Gras Krewes, to certify publicly that they did not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, in order to obtain parade permits and other public licenses. In effect, the ordinance required these, and other, private social groups to abandon their traditional code of secrecy and identify their members for the city's Human Relations Commission. In protest, the 19th century krewes Comus and Momus stopped parading. Proteus did parade in the 1992 Carnival season but subsequently also suspended its parade for a time. In 2000, Proteus returned to the parade schedule. Two federal courts later declared that the ordinance was an unconstitutional infringement on First Amendment rights of free association, and an unwarranted intrusion on the privacy of the groups subject to the ordinance. The Supreme Court refused to hear the city's appeal from this decision. Today, many krewes operate under a business structure; membership is basically open to anyone who pays dues to have a place on a parade float.


The date can vary from as early as February 3 to as late as March 9. As it is the last day before the start of Lent, the date is dependent on that of Easter.

Shrove Tuesday (and Mardi Gras) will occur on the following dates in the following years:(carnevale)

2008 — 5 February

2009 — 24 February

2010 — 16 February

2011 — 8 March

2012 — 21 February

2013 — 12 February

2014 — 4 March

2015 — 17 February

2016 — 9 February

2017 — 28 February

2018 — 13 February

2019 — 5 March

2020 — 25 February

2021 — 16 February

2022 — 1 March

2023 — 21 February

2024 — 13 February

2025 — 4 March

2026 — 17 February

2027 — 9 February

2028 — 29 February

2029 — 13 February

2030 — 5 March

2031 — 25 February

2032 — 10 February

2033 — 1 March

2034 — 21 February

2035 — 6 February

2036 — 26 February

2037 — 17 February

2038 — 9 March

2039 — 22 February

2040 — 14 February

2041 — 5 March

2042 — 18 February

2043 — 10 February

2044 — 1 March

2045 — 21 February

2046 — 6 February

2047 — 26 February

2048 — 18 February

2049 — 2 March

2050 — 22 February