Astrological Calendar 2026: Retrogrades, Ingresses and Moon Phases

Astrologers track three kinds of events: retrogrades, ingresses (a planet moving into a new sign) and lunations, the full and new moons. This page puts all three in one list for the next few months, so you can see what is coming before you book the trip, sign the lease or send the email.

The dates come from an ephemeris based on NASA JPL data, the same one behind our birth charts, and each event is timed to the minute.

Seen from Earth, a planet sometimes appears to slow down, stop and drift backward through the zodiac for a few weeks before turning direct again. Nothing actually reverses; it is an optical effect, like overtaking a slower car on the highway. Astrologers read the backward stretch as a time to review and revisit whatever that planet rules.

Mercury retrograde, which comes around three or four times a year, gets the headlines, with its reputation for missed emails, delayed flights and dead phone batteries. Venus retrograde turns attention to love and money, Mars retrograde to drive and anger, and the outer planets from Jupiter outward spend months at a time in retrograde. Our Mercury retrograde page shows whether Mercury is retrograde right now.

Each sign covers exactly 30 degrees of the zodiac, and an ingress is the moment a planet crosses from one into the next. The planet itself does not change, but the way astrologers read it does, since a sign colors how a planet behaves.

The Moon changes sign every couple of days and the Sun about once a month; Mercury and Venus take a few weeks. The ingresses astrologers watch most closely belong to the slow planets. Jupiter moves into a new sign about once a year and Saturn every two to three years, and each of those ingresses is read as the start of a new chapter.

Every 29.5 days or so the Moon runs through a full cycle, from new moon, when it sits with the Sun and can't be seen, to full moon, when it stands opposite the Sun and is fully lit. Astrologers read the new moon as a time to start things and the full moon as a time when things come to a head.

For the complete lists, see the Full Moon Calendar and the New Moon Calendar, or check tonight's phase on Moon Phase Today.

The calendar tells you what the sky is doing; your birth chart tells you where it lands. The same Saturn ingress can fall in one person's house of money and another's house of marriage, depending on how their houses are laid out.

So start with a free birth chart, which shows your planets, houses and Rising sign. Sigastra's weekly and monthly forecasts, included in Plus, read the coming transits against that chart.