Retrograde Calendar 2026

Each row above is one planet, and each coloured bar is one retrograde period, drawn to scale across the twelve months of the year. The shape tells you something a list of dates cannot: Mercury appears as three short bursts, the outer planets as one long block, and Venus or Mars sometimes as nothing at all. A year is not evenly stocked with retrogrades, and seeing the gaps matters as much as seeing the periods.

Open any planet to get its own page, where each period is broken out into four dates rather than two — the two stations, plus the shadow period either side — along with the exact degree of the zodiac the planet turns at. Those pages carry the neighbouring years too, so a bar that runs off the edge of this strip can be followed to where it actually ends.

Everything in this retrograde calendar is computed rather than transcribed, and every time is converted to your own timezone rather than published in ours. The second point sounds cosmetic and is not: a station at 06:47 UTC falls on the 26th in Berlin and the 25th in Los Angeles, so a calendar printing one fixed timezone is a full day wrong for a large share of its readers.

The illusion is the one you get passing a slower car: for a moment the other car appears to slide backwards against the landscape behind it, though nothing about its own motion changed. Astronomy has understood this since Copernicus, and astrology has never claimed otherwise — the symbolism is built on the apparent motion, not on a physical reversal.

The two moments worth dating are the stations: the instants when the apparent motion stops and turns. A station is a sign change in speed, so unlike most things in astrology it has exactly one right answer and can be computed to the second. That is why this retrograde calendar is organised around stations rather than loose date ranges.

Two rows are worth pausing on. Mercury is retrograde 19% of the time — roughly one day in five — which is why it dominates the conversation and also why, statistically, a Mercury retrograde is not a remarkable event. Venus is the opposite: retrograde only 7% of the time and skipping whole calendar years, which makes a Venus retrograde genuinely rare and worth marking in a way Mercury is not.

At the far end, Neptune and Pluto are retrograde more than 40% of every year, and Uranus 41%. That is why they are absent from the strip above and have no pages here: a condition holding for five months out of twelve is closer to a season than an event, and presenting it as news would mislead. Their stations are real, but they belong in a transit reading rather than a calendar.

Because a planet turns around, it covers the same stretch of zodiac three times: forward, backward, then forward again. The outer two passes are the shadow. The pre-retrograde shadow begins when the planet first reaches the degree it will later station direct at; the post-retrograde shadow ends when it climbs back to the degree it originally turned from.

That is geometry rather than an interpretive layer, which is the useful part — you can check the shadow dates against any ephemeris, because they are simply the two crossings of the station degrees. Each planet page lists all four dates, and the Mercury page carries a plotted diagram of the loop with those degrees marked.

Positions come from astronomy-engine, an open-source ephemeris, computed geocentrically — the frame astrology uses, and a different quantity from the heliocentric longitudes the same library returns if you ask for the wrong one. To find a station we sample each planet’s speed coarsely until the moment it changes sign is bracketed, then bisect inside that bracket down to the second.

Speed itself is measured symmetrically around each instant rather than forward from it. That sounds like an implementation detail and is not: a forward difference reports the speed of half a day later, and it put two of the six 2026 Mercury stations on the wrong calendar day until we corrected it. The published dates for a reference year are now pinned by an automated test, so a change to the engine breaks the build instead of quietly moving the dates you read here.