Mercury retrograde: 24 October 2026 to 13 November 2026

What is actually happening

Mercury never moves backwards. It orbits the Sun in the same direction as everything else, and it never slows down to do this.

What changes is where we are watching from. Mercury's year is 88 days against our 365, so it laps us. For most of that lap Mercury is on the far side of the Sun, drifting the same way as everything else. The reversal comes when it swings round to our side and passes between us and the Sun: for those few weeks it is crossing our line of sight in the opposite direction, and against the fixed stars it appears to slide backwards before picking up its usual course.

The two moments either end are called stations: the points where the apparent motion stops before reversing. They are what the table above gives, computed to the minute, because "late October" is not an answer anyone can use.

Mercury's real apparent path over the period, plotted from its computed position each day. The marked points are the two stations. The loop is the whole phenomenon: a planet that never stopped, seen from a planet that did not stop either.

How often, and for how long

Three times a year, for between 20 and 24 days each time, with remarkable regularity. Venus does the same thing about every 19 months for roughly six weeks, and Mars every 26 months for two to three months. Further out the pattern turns over: Jupiter and Saturn go retrograde roughly once a year, for four or five months at a time, because at that distance the loop is set almost entirely by Earth's own orbit rather than the planet's.

There is nothing unusual about any of it. Mercury spends around 20% of its time in apparent retrograde, which is to say roughly one day in five, every year, for as long as there have been people to look.