Venus and Mercury Retrograde 2026: Dates and Times

Venus’s retrograde ends on 14 November 2026 at 00:21 UTC and Mercury’s on 13 November at 15:52 UTC. Venus began its backward loop on 3 October and Mercury on 24 October. Retrograde is apparent motion, an effect of viewing angle.

By World Date and Time editorial team · Published 3 November 2026

Venus’s retrograde ends on 14 Nov at 00:21 UTC and Mercury’s on 13 Nov at 15:52 UTC, 8 hours 29 minutes earlier. Venus began its backward loop on 3 Oct at 07:10 UTC and Mercury on 24 Oct at 07:15 UTC, so both planets are retrograde as this page is published, and Mercury’s entire loop sits inside Venus’s. “Retrograde” describes how a planet appears to move against the stars as seen from Earth. Neither planet reverses in its orbit, and nothing here is about luck or behaviour: this is astronomy only. The table below turns each turning point into local time for five places. Each figure is computed with an ephemeris library, and the check against NASA JPL’s Horizons system is described at the end.

Method: A station is the instant a planet's apparent ecliptic longitude stops falling or rising. Found with the astronomy-engine library (astronomy-engine 2.1.19): geocentric apparent longitude of date, the daily motion tested every 6 hours and refined by bisection to the minute. Local times use tzdata, so the abbreviation changes where a clock change falls inside the window. Venus's turn is very flat, so other ephemerides can differ from these times by several minutes.

Read it with the date in mind. Venus’s turn to direct is 14 Nov at 00:21 UTC, which is 19:21 EST on 13 Nov in New York and 16:21 PST on 13 Nov in Los Angeles, so on the US clocks it is still 13 November, and 11:21 AEDT on 14 Nov in Sydney. Mercury’s turn is 15:52 GMT on 13 Nov in London and 02:52 AEDT on 14 Nov in Sydney. The abbreviation changes down the table because clocks changed inside the window: the UK went back to GMT on 25 October, the US on 1 November, while Sydney stays on AEDT. Venus’s first turn was 03:10 EDT on 3 Oct in New York, still on daylight time. Compare any of them against your own clock with the UTC clock.

What retrograde means

Planets mostly drift eastward against the background stars from night to night. Retrograde is the stretch when an inner planet appears to slow, stop, drift west for a few weeks, stop again and then resume eastward. The stops are called stations. Think of overtaking a slower car on a motorway: for a moment the other car seems to slide backwards against the hills behind it, though neither car reverses. Venus and Mercury are the faster cars. NASA gives Mercury’s year as 88 Earth days and calls it the fastest planet (NASA Mercury facts). Venus takes 225 Earth days to orbit the Sun (NASA Venus facts). Earth takes about 365. Each time an inner planet laps us it passes between Earth and the Sun, and from here it crosses the sky from east to west for a while.

Do not confuse this with Venus’s own spin. NASA notes that Venus rotates backwards compared with most planets, so the Sun would rise in the west there. That is a fact about the planet’s rotation and holds all the time. The retrograde on this page is about where the planet appears in our sky and ends on 14 November.

Why both at once

A retrograde loop is centred on the inferior conjunction, the moment the planet passes the Sun in the sky. Venus did so on 24 Oct at 03:39 UTC, 0.273 astronomical units from Earth and 6.5° from the Sun. Mercury does so on 4 Nov at 14:25 UTC, 0.674 units away and 0.37° from the Sun. The Venus conjunction is 11 days before Mercury’s, so the two loops overlap. The second table gives the length and size of each loop.

Method: Length is the time between the two stations in the table above. The arc is the fall in ecliptic longitude between them. Inferior conjunction is when the planet passes the Sun in ecliptic longitude. Closest to the Sun is the smallest angle between the planet and the Sun's centre within 12 hours of that moment. One astronomical unit (AU) is the average distance from Earth to the Sun.

Venus’s loop is the longer, 41.7 days against 20.4, but they cover almost the same stretch of sky: 15.6° backwards for Venus and 15.9° for Mercury. On average Venus slides back 0.37° a day and Mercury 0.78° a day, so Mercury’s loop is the quicker and sharper. Mercury has three loops in 2026 (26 Feb, 29 Jun, 24 Oct), and over 2026 to 2028 they start about 117 days apart on average. Venus has one in 2026 and its next is 19.2 months after this one, because a planet that orbits slower than Mercury needs far longer to lap us again.

Where to look

Both planets stay close to the Sun, so neither can be seen at its best around conjunction. On 3 Oct Venus stood 29.2° east of the Sun in the evening sky. On 14 Nov it is 28.8° west of the Sun in the morning sky, so it moves from evening to morning in six weeks. Mercury goes from 20.3° east of the Sun to 16.4° west of it. In the constellation sense, Venus is in Virgo at both stations, and Mercury moves from Libra into Virgo. These are sky positions only. For altitude and compass bearing for your own place, open the planets page, and see when the Sun rises or sets on the day and night map. The sun and moon hub lists the rest. The US Naval Observatory publishes rise, set and transit times for the planets for any place (USNO data services). Keep a clear horizon, and never look at the Sun through binoculars or a telescope.

Following the loop yourself

The motion is slow. Even Mercury, the faster of the two, backs up less than 0.8° a day on average, and near each station the daily motion shrinks towards nothing. That is why a week is the shortest useful gap if you want to see a planet shift against a bright star. Note where it sits relative to a fixed star or to the other planet on one clear morning, then look again seven days later from the same spot at the same time. The planets page above gives altitude and bearing for your location, so you can find the planet quickly. After 14 Nov, both planets resume their normal eastward drift, and the weeks of backward motion are over until 9 Feb 2027, when Mercury stops again.

Is Mercury crossing the Sun?

No. A transit needs the planet to pass in front of the Sun’s disc. At its closest on 4 Nov Mercury is 0.37° from the Sun’s centre and the Sun’s radius is 0.27°, so it passes about 0.1° outside the edge. NASA’s catalogue lists the next Mercury transits as 13 November 2032 and 7 November 2039 (NASA GSFC Mercury transit catalogue). The site’s transits guide has the rest, including Venus.

What comes next

Mercury’s next loop starts on 9 Feb at 17:36 UTC and ends 3 Mar at 12:35 UTC, 21.8 days later. Venus’s next starts on 10 May at 23:02 UTC and lasts 43.0 days. The table gives every loop to the end of 2028.

Method: Same method as the first table, run for 2026 to 2028. Dates are UTC and fall a day earlier or later on some local clocks.

Method and limits

The positions come from the astronomy-engine library (source code), the same one the planets page uses. For each planet we took the geocentric apparent ecliptic longitude of date, tested its daily motion every six hours from 2026 to 2028, and refined each sign change by bisection to the minute. NASA’s Horizons system gives the reference: on 31 October 2026 we compared the engine with Horizons, and both Mercury times agree within three minutes and both Venus times within about seven. Venus’s longitude hardly changes for hours around a station, so a few minutes of disagreement between ephemerides is normal and the dates are the same. A station is a mathematical instant, and the planet looks stationary for days either side of it. Times are in UTC, with local clocks from tzdata. Distances are geocentric, in astronomical units.