Retrograde planets in 2026 and 2027.

Seen from Earth, every planet now and then seems to stop, drift backward along the zodiac, stop again and move on. Nothing reverses in space. Earth and the other planet travel around the Sun at different speeds, and as one overtakes the other the line of sight swings back for a few weeks or months.

The two turning points are the stations. A planet stations retrograde when its forward motion falls to zero and it starts to slip back, and stations direct when the backward drift ends. Around each station it hardly moves at all, which is why astrologers treat those days as the loudest part of a retrograde.

A retrograde retraces ground. The pre-shadow begins when the planet, still moving forward, first reaches the degree where it will later station direct; the post-shadow ends when it passes the degree where it stationed retrograde. Between those two dates it covers the same stretch of the zodiac three times.

For Mercury the shadow adds two or three weeks at each end. For the slow outer planets it fills most of the year, which is why many astrologers pay it little attention beyond Mars. The calendar lists it for every planet so you can weigh it yourself, planet by planet and year by year.

Mercury turns retrograde about three times a year for about three weeks, Venus every nineteen months for about six weeks, and Mars every twenty-six months for two to two and a half months. These are the retrogrades people notice, because they are rare or short enough to stand out.

From Jupiter outward the picture flips. Jupiter is retrograde about four months a year, Saturn four and a half, Uranus five, Neptune and Pluto five to six. For the outer planets a retrograde is a regular season of the year, read as a time to review what that planet stands for.

Each row is one planet in one year. The solid bar is the retrograde itself, from station retrograde to station direct; the lighter bars on either side are the pre-shadow and the post-shadow. Times in the station table are in UTC, so a station at 11 p.m. UTC already falls on the next day in Istanbul, Sofia or Berlin. The live block at the top uses your own clock.

Overlaps say more than any single bar. When Mercury turns retrograde while Venus or Mars is retrograde too, astrologers read the weeks as a double review: plans and relationships, or plans and drive, both asked to slow down at once. In most years at least two of the outer planets are retrograde at the same time, so their overlaps are background rather than news.

To see what a retrograde touches in your own chart, note the sign and degree in the station table and look for that degree in your birth chart. A station within a few degrees of your Sun, Moon or rising sign is the one worth watching.

Each planet's apparent position comes from planetary theory (VSOP87 for Mercury to Neptune, Meeus for Pluto), corrected for light time, aberration and nutation. The same engine draws the birth chart. The stations are the instants when the planet's motion in longitude changes sign, found to the minute.

The whole table is recomputed from the planets' real motion by our own astronomy engine every time the site is built, with each station placed where the planet's motion reverses, so the calendar never goes out of date. Mercury has its own page with a live answer and every period since 2024: is Mercury retrograde. The retrograde planets 2027 table gathers next year's stations in UTC and US Eastern time.