Venus is retrograde now, until 14 November 2026
Venus is retrograde right now, and appears to move backwards until 14 November 2026 at 00:20 GMT. Every time below is computed from the planet's real position, in UK local time.
When it happens
| Appears to turn back | Appears to turn forward | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 42 days | ||
| 43 days | ||
| 41 days |
What is actually happening
Venus never moves backwards. It orbits the Sun in the same direction as everything else, inside the Earth's orbit, once every 225 days, and it never slows down to do this.
What changes is where we are watching from. Venus laps us once every 584 days — about nineteen months — and for most of that lap it 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 six weeks it is crossing our line of sight in the opposite direction, and against the background sky it appears to slide backwards before picking up its usual course. The middle of the loop is the moment Venus is closest to the Earth, and the moment it moves from the evening sky to the morning sky.
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.
Venus'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
Once every nineteen months or so, for between 41 and 43 days each time. The pattern nearly repeats every eight years, because eight of our years are almost exactly five of these cycles: a retrograde that begins in early October will begin again two or three days earlier in the calendar eight years on, a couple of degrees further back along the ecliptic. Mercury does the same thing three times a year for about three weeks, and Mars every 26 months for two to three months.
There is nothing unusual about any of it. Measured from the periods above, Venus spends about 7% of its time in apparent retrograde — roughly 42 days in every nineteen months — and has done for as long as there have been people to look.
Why we compute this
Eondra is a daily timing brief. It reads the same planetary positions this page is drawn from, weighs them against what you have actually logged as working for you, and returns one number and a short written brief for the day ahead.
It does not tell you to put off anything while Venus is retrograde. The brief carries the retrograde as a flag with the date it ends — a reason to revisit, never a reason to stop — and tells you what your own record suggests about the day you are actually in.
The same engine publishes Mercury retrograde dates and Mars retrograde dates, and how the number is built.