Which planets are retrograde right now?

What the board measures

A planet is retrograde when its geocentric longitude is decreasing — when the number in the position column is getting smaller from one day to the next. That is the whole test, and it is the same one the transit terminal applies: the sign of the daily motion. The eight bodies here are the ones that ever pass it; the Sun and Moon never move backwards against the zodiac. The board reads all eight at once, and for each one dates the station on either side of now from a single twelve-hourly lattice, so the instant a planet turns is the same instant on every page of this site.

Two kinds of retrograde

The count on this page is mostly a fact about the outer planets. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto each retrograde once a year for four to five months — Uranus for 151 days, Neptune for 159, Pluto for 162 — because the retrograde is Earth overtaking them on the inside, and Earth does that every year. So each of them is retrograde around 44% of the time, and two or three of the five are retrograde on most days of any year. That is background, not an event.

The inner three are the other kind. Mercury retrogrades 3 times in 2026 for about three weeks each, retracing 15.9° this time; Venus does it once every nineteen months for around six weeks (42 days from 3 Oct 2026); Mars once every twenty-six months for two and a half (81 days from 10 Jan 2027). These are the retrogrades that read as periods, because they are rare enough to have a before and an after. When the board shows one of them retrograde, that is the row worth reading first.

Collective weather

Every station happens at the same instant for everyone, and the arc a planet retraces is the same band of the zodiac in every chart. The tradition reads a retrograde as a review window for that planet's business — Mercury's messages and arrangements, Venus's valuations, Mars's momentum — and that is a description of a season's texture, shared by everyone living through it. It is not a hazard and this page does not treat it as one.

What the sky-only reading leaves out

Whether a particular retrograde touches you is a question about degrees. The arc is a specific band — 5.0° Scorpio to 20.9° Scorpio for Mercury's next cycle — and a natal planet inside it is crossed three times over the whole cycle, which is a dated personal transit. A natal planet outside it gets the ordinary passing contacts and nothing more. The rows below hand each planet to the place that checks: the transit hubs for the slow planets, the calculator for Mercury, and the app for the full chart.

Why two sites disagree about the dates

A station is one instant in UTC; printed as a date in a publisher's own time zone it can land a day either side. Shadow periods differ more, because sites define them differently — some by the degrees retraced, as here, some by an orb around them. What does not differ is the zodiac: a station is a station in the tropical and the sidereal frame alike, since the longitude stops decreasing at the same moment whatever the zero point. Only the sign named for it changes.

What the instrument claims

It computes eight stations from real positions, dates each to the minute, and measures the arcs and shadows. It does not say what any retrograde brings, and it does not rank this year against another. Where each one sits in your chart is the question the handoff answers.