Is Mercury retrograde right now?
Live status from the Swiss Ephemeris, with the exact station times and shadow periods for the current and next cycle.
No — Mercury is direct at 28.9° Leo, moving +1.998° a day. The next retrograde begins in 60 days, on 24 Oct 2026.
Snapshot at 2026-08-24 22:15 UTC. With JavaScript on, the verdict is recomputed at load from the current speed of Mercury (POST /api/objects); the dates come from the committed station table.
No. Mercury is direct, at 28.9° Leo and moving +1.998° a day as of 2026-08-24 22:15 UTC. The next retrograde begins 24 Oct 2026, 07:08 UTC at 20.9° Scorpio and ends 13 Nov 2026, 15:56 UTC at 5.0° Scorpio — 60 days from the snapshot. Mercury is outside both shadow periods. Times are UTC; the station instants are interpolated from a 12-hourly Swiss Ephemeris lattice and are good to within about ten minutes.
Computed 2026-08-24 22:15 UTC · Swiss Ephemeris 2.10.03 (pyswisseph) via POST /api/objects and POST /api/scan · tropical zodiac, geocentric, times in UTC. The static figures are recomputed on every deploy; the live block refreshes when the page loads.
Mercury retrograde dates, computed
Every cycle in range. A station is where the apparent motion crosses zero; the instant is interpolated between twelve-hourly samples and is good to about ten minutes, which is why it is printed to the minute and not the second.
| Stations retrograde | Stations direct | Days | Arc retraced | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 24 | 11.3° | past | ||
| 20 | 16.1° | past | ||
| 23 | 14.1° | past | ||
| 24 | 9.9° | past | ||
| 20 | 15.9° | upcoming | ||
| 22 | 15.1° | upcoming | ||
| 24 | 8.9° | upcoming | ||
| 21 | 15.6° | upcoming | ||
| 21 | 15.7° | upcoming | ||
| 24 | 8.6° | upcoming |
What this means for everyone
What “retrograde” measures
Mercury does not reverse its orbit. Retrograde is the geometry of two planets orbiting the Sun at different speeds: three times a year Mercury laps Earth on the inside, and for about three weeks its position against the zodiac, as seen from here, moves backwards. The station is the instant that apparent motion passes through zero — a real, computable moment — and the two stations bound the retrograde proper. The pre- and post-shadow periods are the stretches before and after in which Mercury covers the same degrees it will retrace or has just retraced.
A retrograde is collective weather
Mercury's stations happen at the same instant for everyone; the 15.9° arc it retraces this cycle, from 20.9° Scorpio back to 5.0° Scorpio, is the same arc for every chart. The tradition reads a Mercury retrograde as a review window — plans, messages, contracts and travel details asking to be re-read rather than pushed through — and that framing applies to the period as a whole. It is a description of the season's texture, not an event that happens to you.
What the sky-only reading cannot say is whether this particular retrograde touches your chart at all. The retrograde arc is a specific band of the zodiac. If one of your natal planets sits inside it, Mercury crosses that point three times over about six weeks — direct, retrograde, direct again — and that is a dated, personal transit. If nothing of yours is in the band, the same three weeks pass with Mercury making only the passing contacts it always makes. That is the question the calculator answers, and it is the reason this page hands off to it.
Why the dates differ between sites
The station instant is a single moment in UTC. Sites that publish it as a date in their own time zone can land it a day apart — a station at 07:00 UTC is the previous evening in California. Sidereal tables differ in a second way: the same station falls about 24° earlier in the zodiac, so the sign named for it can differ. This page prints UTC instants and tropical degrees and says so, which is what makes it possible to check.
What the instrument does and does not claim
It computes the stations, the arc and the shadows from real positions and dates them to the minute. It does not claim that anything in particular goes wrong during the window, and it does not rank this retrograde against the last one. Where it sits in your chart, and what that has meant for you before, is what the journal and the calculator are for.
For your chart specifically
This cycle retraces 20.9° Scorpio → 5.0° Scorpio. Whether it matters to you is whether one of your natal points sits in that band — the calculator checks from a birth date, and the app dates every crossing against your full chart.
How this appears in Cosmic KPI
The Retrograde Windows pack in Life Cycles shows every retrograde for every planet with its shadow periods shaded on your timeline, and the terminal flags which of your natal points sit inside the current arc.
Common questions
- Is Mercury retrograde right now?
- No. Mercury is direct, at 28.9° Leo and moving +1.998° a day as of 2026-08-24 22:15 UTC. The next retrograde begins 24 Oct 2026, 07:08 UTC at 20.9° Scorpio and ends 13 Nov 2026, 15:56 UTC at 5.0° Scorpio — 60 days from the snapshot.
- When is the next Mercury retrograde?
- 24 Oct 2026, 07:08 UTC to 13 Nov 2026, 15:56 UTC, from 20.9° Scorpio back to 5.0° Scorpio — 20 days, retracing 15.9°.
- When does the shadow period start?
- The pre-retrograde shadow begins 4 Oct 2026, 09:15 UTC, when Mercury first reaches 5.0° Scorpio; the post-retrograde shadow ends 30 Nov 2026, 06:11 UTC, when it returns to 20.9° Scorpio.
- How many times a year is Mercury retrograde?
- Three times in most years, occasionally four, for 20–24 days each. The table above lists every cycle in the computed range with its station instants.
- Does this Mercury retrograde affect me?
- It depends on whether the retraced arc contains one of your natal degrees. The Mercury retrograde calculator takes a birth date and lists which of your planets fall inside the arc; the full chart in the app dates each crossing.
Does this retrograde cross anything in your chart?
Cosmic KPI computes every Mercury crossing against your natal points — exact dates, visible math, your own chart. No account needed to start.
Enter your birth details →