See every retrograde through 2027.

Retrograde right now: Mercury, Neptune, and Pluto. Everything else is direct. The tables above list every window for 2026 and 2027, station to station, refined to the hour.

No. Retrograde motion is a line-of-sight effect between planets orbiting the Sun at different speeds. The Moon orbits Earth directly and the Sun’s apparent motion is Earth’s own orbit reflected back, so neither ever appears to reverse.

Mostly no. Jupiter through Pluto spend four to six months of every year retrograde — it is their normal rhythm, and roughly half of everyone alive has at least one outer planet retrograde in their birth chart. Astrologers read them as quieter, more internal phases of a planet’s theme, nothing like the scheduling folklore around Mercury.

The turnaround. A planet slows, hangs at one degree for days, then reverses — first at the retrograde station, later at the direct station. The positions in the tables mark those standstills, and astrologers treat a station degree as the sensitive point of the whole window.

Frequency and territory. Mercury flips three or four times a year — the only planet that retrogrades more often than annually — and astrology assigns it the daily-life file: messages, travel, contracts. Venus and Mars retrogrades are rarer and read as deeper reviews of attachment and drive. The full Mercury story has its own page.