Reread before you sign.
Not because a planet is watching, but because rereading is cheap and the cost of not rereading is not. If a three-week window is what makes you do it, the window earned its keep.
Geocentric tropical longitude · refined to the minute
No Mercury is not retrograde right now.
No. Mercury is direct. The next retrograde runs from October 24, 2026 to November 13, 2026, beginning at 20°59' in Scorpio in 35 days.
Stations retrograde
October 24, 2026
07:07 UTC
Days away
35
from September 19, 2026 at 21:21 UTC
Retrograde in
Scorpio
20°59' back to 5°02'
Shadow to shadow
57 days
20 of them retrograde
Not the only one
Mercury shares this window with 4 other planets.
Measured at the midpoint of the October 24 – November 13, 2026 retrograde. Mercury gets the headlines because its period is short and frequent; the slower planets are retrograde for months at a time and pass unnoticed.
Open the full tracker- VEVenusvalues, relationships, and resources
- SASaturnstructure, duty, and long-term limits
- URUranuschange, independence, and disruption
- NENeptuneimagination, ideals, and uncertainty
The part the date lists leave out
Why it starts before the date and ends after it.
Mercury does not stop and reverse. It slows, appears to travel backward against the zodiac for about three weeks, then slows again and resumes. What that leaves behind is an arc of sky it crosses three times: forward to the degree it will turn back from, backward across that arc, and forward over the same ground again.
That three-pass arc is the shadow. It is why the period readers describe rarely matches the dates they were given — the published three weeks sit in the middle of roughly eight.
57 days from shadow to shadow, of which 20 are retrograde. Mercury covers 15.9° of Scorpio in each direction.
Both shadow edges have to be solved for: the date Mercury first reaches the degree it will later station direct at, and the date it regains the degree it stationed retrograde at. Neither can be read from a table, which is why most sites do not publish them.
Every period, computed
Mercury retrograde dates.
Station instants in UTC, the zodiac degree each station falls at, and both shadow edges. A station at 07:07 UTC is the previous evening in the Americas — that difference is where most date disagreements between sites come from.
Retrograde
Stations
Degrees
Shadow
March 15 – April 7, 2025
23 days
Rx 06:48 UTCD 10:57 UTC
9°36' Aries → 26°50' Pisces
March 1, 2025 → April 26, 2025
July 18 – August 11, 2025
24 days
Rx 04:41 UTCD 07:16 UTC
15°35' Leo → 4°15' Leo
June 30, 2025 → August 25, 2025
November 9 – November 29, 2025
20 days
Rx 18:55 UTCD 17:32 UTC
6°52' Sagittarius → 20°42' Scorpio
October 21, 2025 → December 17, 2025
February 26 – March 20, 2026
23 days
Rx 06:45 UTCD 19:37 UTC
22°34' Pisces → 8°30' Pisces
February 11, 2026 → April 9, 2026
June 29 – July 23, 2026
24 days
Rx 17:42 UTCD 22:46 UTC
26°16' Cancer → 16°19' Cancer
June 13, 2026 → August 7, 2026
October 24 – November 13, 2026
20 days
· next
Rx 07:07 UTCD 15:51 UTC
20°59' Scorpio → 5°02' Scorpio
October 4, 2026 → November 30, 2026
February 9 – March 3, 2027
22 days
Rx 17:26 UTCD 12:36 UTC
5°59' Pisces → 20°56' Aquarius
January 25, 2027 → March 23, 2027
June 10 – July 4, 2027
24 days
Rx 18:06 UTCD 19:44 UTC
6°22' Cancer → 27°28' Gemini
May 26, 2027 → July 19, 2027
October 7 – October 28, 2027
21 days
Rx 14:25 UTCD 14:11 UTC
4°56' Scorpio → 19°19' Libra
September 17, 2027 → November 13, 2027
January 24 – February 14, 2028
21 days
Rx 10:53 UTCD 12:34 UTC
19°42' Aquarius → 3°59' Aquarius
January 8, 2028 → March 5, 2028
May 21 – June 14, 2028
24 days
Rx 08:35 UTCD 06:02 UTC
16°19' Gemini → 7°46' Gemini
May 6, 2028 → June 29, 2028
September 19 – October 11, 2028
22 days
Rx 16:16 UTCD 10:23 UTC
18°36' Libra → 3°29' Libra
August 30, 2028 → October 26, 2028
January 7 – January 27, 2029
20 days
Rx 07:48 UTCD 18:30 UTC
3°38' Aquarius → 17°32' Capricorn
December 21, 2028 → February 16, 2029
May 1 – May 25, 2029
24 days
Rx 23:13 UTCD 19:02 UTC
26°41' Taurus → 17°34' Taurus
April 17, 2029 → June 10, 2029
September 2 – September 25, 2029
23 days
Rx 12:10 UTCD 01:52 UTC
1°50' Libra → 17°27' Virgo
August 13, 2029 → October 9, 2029
December 22 – January 11, 2030
20 days
Rx 05:43 UTCD 05:40 UTC
17°42' Capricorn → 1°26' Capricorn
December 4, 2029 → January 30, 2030
What to do with it
A prompt, not a forecast.
No study has found that Mercury's apparent direction affects contracts, devices, travel, or conversations. Nothing here needs to be postponed. What the period is genuinely useful for is the habit it suggests.
Confirm rather than assume.
Times, places, who is bringing what. Most of what gets blamed on Mercury is an arrangement two people remembered differently and neither checked.
Finish before you start.
The traditional reading of a retrograde is review, not launch. Treat it as permission to close open work instead of a reason to delay something that is ready.
Do not wait for it to pass.
Mercury is retrograde roughly three weeks in nine. A rule that stops you acting for a fifth of your life is not caution, and no astrologer worth reading will tell you otherwise.
Check it yourself
Dates with a method you can audit.
Mercury's apparent geocentric tropical longitude is compared either side of a sample. Where the direction changes, the crossing is narrowed by binary search until it resolves to the minute, which is why a station here carries a timestamp rather than a whole-day label.
Shadow edges use the same method against a fixed target longitude: the pre-shadow is the instant Mercury first reaches the degree it will later station direct at, the post-shadow the instant it regains the degree it stationed retrograde at. The full model, sources and tolerances are on How we calculate; every planetary position for any date is in Today's sky.
Make it personal
A retrograde only matters where it lands.
Mercury turning back at 20°59' in Scorpio means nothing in the abstract. It means something when you know which house of your own chart that degree sits in, and what it touches there.
Reader reviews
What readers say about the Retrograde tracker
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Frequently asked questions
Is Mercury in retrograde right now?
No. Mercury is direct. The next retrograde runs from October 24, 2026 to November 13, 2026, beginning at 20°59' in Scorpio in 35 days. The direction is recalculated from Mercury’s geocentric tropical longitude rather than read from a stored calendar.
When is the next Mercury retrograde?
The next Mercury retrograde runs from October 24, 2026 to November 13, 2026, lasting 20 days. Mercury stations retrograde at 20°59' in Scorpio and stations direct at 5°02' in Scorpio.
What is the Mercury retrograde shadow period?
The shadow is the stretch of zodiac Mercury covers three times: forward to the degree it will turn back from, backward across it, and forward over the same arc again. For the October 24 – November 13, 2026 retrograde the shadow runs October 4, 2026 to November 30, 2026, which is 57 days against 20 days of retrograde itself. Both edges are solved from Mercury’s longitude, not estimated.
How many times a year is Mercury retrograde?
Three times in most years and occasionally four, for roughly three weeks each time. Mercury covers between eight and sixteen degrees of the zodiac during a retrograde, so the periods are the shortest and most frequent of any planet.
What does Mercury retrograde actually mean astronomically?
Mercury never reverses its orbit. Earth and Mercury orbit at different speeds, and when the geometry between them changes, Mercury’s apparent position against the background zodiac moves backward for a time — the same way a slower train appears to roll backward from the window of a faster one. The motion is real; the direction is a matter of where it is measured from.
What should you not do during Mercury retrograde?
There is no measured evidence that Mercury’s apparent direction affects contracts, devices, travel, or conversations, and no decision has to be postponed because of it. Astrologically the period is used as a prompt to review rather than to launch: reread before signing, confirm arrangements, back things up. Those are useful habits in any three weeks of the year.
Why do Mercury retrograde dates differ between websites?
Time zone is the usual reason: a station at 07:07 UTC falls on the previous evening in the Americas. The rest come from rounding to whole days, from tropical versus sidereal coordinates, and from where a site draws the line on a planet that is barely moving. These dates are geocentric, tropical, in UTC, and refined to the minute around the crossing.
