Saturn Retrograde
2026

Saturn Retrograde 2026 Dates and Station Times

Saturn stations retrograde at 14.7° Aries on July 26, 2026, at 19:56 UTC and stations direct at 7.9° Aries on December 10, 2026, at 23:31 UTC, 137 days later. The retrograde covers 6.8° of Aries.

Saturn Retrograde Dates for Every Year, 2025–2035

One Saturn retrograde begins in each year from 2025 to 2035. Lengths range from 133 to 137 days; an average year has 126 retrograde days, 34.4% of the calendar.

Saturn's stations are the minutes when its computed longitude stops and reverses. Shadow dates (UTC) mark the first and last crossings of the retrograde stretch, as the About page describes.

14 Days Later and 14° Further Each Year

From one retrograde to the next, Saturn's station moves 12.8° to 14.2° along the zodiac and arrives 13 to 15 days later each year. A sign is 30° wide, so Saturn retrogrades in the same sign two or three years running before it moves on: Aries (2025–2027), Taurus (2028–2029), Gemini (2030–2031), Cancer (2032–2033) and Leo (2034–2035).

By tradition three of those are hard signs for Saturn: Aries, its fall; Cancer and Leo, both signs of its detriment.

The yearly step widens a little as Saturn nears perihelion, its closest point to the Sun, on November 28, 2032. It peaks at 14.2° from the 2031 retrograde to the 2032 one.

What a Saturn Retrograde Is

Saturn needs about 29.5 years to circle the zodiac, so it advances only 13° to 14° a year. Once a year the Earth passes between it and the Sun, and for about four and a half months around that opposition Saturn appears to slide back 6.7° to 7.0° before resuming.

Saturn has Capricorn and Aquarius for homes and Libra for its exaltation, while Cancer and Leo, opposite its homes, are its detriment and Aries is its fall. Its significations are time and limits: age, debt, property, walls, rules and institutions, and the slow consequences of earlier choices. Retrograde, the tradition reads these as revisited. A deadline moves, an obligation from the past is called in, a structure is tested before it is extended.

The stations matter more than the weeks between them. Saturn holds within 10 arc-minutes of its station degree for 27 to 28 days at each turn, so astrologers treat a Saturn station on a sensitive degree of a chart as a month-long event rather than a single day.

Opposition: Saturn Nearest the Earth

Every Saturn retrograde is centered on opposition, the night Saturn rises at sunset and is nearest the Earth. Across these retrogrades the oppositions range from 8.03 to 8.55 AU, 1,202 to 1,279 million km. The nearest is on December 24, 2032, 26 days after perihelion.

The Saturn Shadow: 325 Days From First Crossing to Last

Saturn Retrograde: Practical Priorities

Born With Saturn Retrograde

Saturn spends 34.4% of the 2025–2035 span retrograde, more than any other planet in this calendar, so a little over one birth in three has it.

Astrologers read it as a relationship with rules and authority worked out from the inside: someone who tests each obligation before accepting it, builds their own discipline rather than inheriting one, and often comes into their own later, around the first Saturn return at about twenty-nine.