Uranus, Neptune, Pluto Retrograde 2026–2028 Dates

On 28 October 2026, two of the three outer planets are retrograde. Neptune has been retrograde since 7 July 2026 and will turn direct on 13 December 2026; Uranus turned retrograde on 10 September 2026 and will stay that way until 8 February 2027. Pluto is already direct again: its 2026 retrograde ended on 16 October 2026, 12 days before this page was published.

Everything below is read off a table of every station of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto from 1950 to 2050, computed from the JPL DE421 ephemeris in the tropical zodiac and in the Lahiri sidereal zodiac of the panchang. None of the three ever moves as much as a tenth of a degree a day, so a station is printed here as a date and never as a clock time; at that pace the instant cannot be pinned closely enough to be worth quoting.

Retrograde and Direct Dates 2026–2028

The table holds ten loops: every retrograde of the three that is under way at some point in 2026, 2027 or 2028. That takes in the Uranus retrograde that began on 6 September 2025 and ended on 4 February 2026, and the one that will begin on 19 September 2028 and run into 2029. Neptune’s and Pluto’s loops each fall inside a single calendar year, one per year.

Every date in the table is the same in both zodiacs, so the sidereal and the tropical columns differ only in where the planet stands. The instants do not quite agree. Sidereal longitude is tropical longitude less the ayanamsa, which creeps up with precession, so a planet’s sidereal speed is a hair slower than its tropical speed; near a station the speed is close to zero and changing only slowly, and that hair moves the moment it reaches zero by up to 1.2 hours for Uranus, 1.8 for Neptune and 2.4 for Pluto. Over 1950–2050 that shift carries 43 of the 602 stations across an IST midnight, so a sidereal and a tropical almanac can print dates a day apart; none of the stations of 2026 to 2028 is one of them.

Why an Outer Planet Goes Retrograde

The backward motion is apparent. No planet reverses in its orbit; the Earth, moving faster on an inside track, overtakes the slower outer planet once a cycle, and while it does, the line of sight from the moving Earth swings backwards against the stars. For these three the overtaking takes a large part of the year because they move so slowly that the Earth’s own motion dominates what we see. The loop each one traces is small. Measured from the retrograde station back to the direct one, the loops in the table cover about 4.0° for Uranus, about 2.8° for Neptune and about 2.4° for Pluto.

How Long Each Retrograde Lasts and How Often

Uranus is retrograde for about 151 days at a time, Neptune for about 159 and Pluto for about 160. Pluto’s lengths spread the widest, from 156 to 165 days across the century. A new retrograde begins a little over a year after the last one, which is why the station dates in the table slide a few days later each year. That slide occasionally steps over a whole calendar year: Uranus has no retrograde station in 1967 and Pluto none in 1970, though even then the planet was retrograde for part of the year, in a loop that began on 30 December 1966 for Uranus and on 30 December 1969 for Pluto. Neptune has a retrograde station in every year of the span.

Dividing the average loop by the gap between loops gives the share of the time each spends retrograde: 41% for Uranus, 43% for Neptune and 44% for Pluto. Put plainly, each of the three is retrograde in some part of every year, for about five months at a stretch.

Days With All Three Retrograde, and Days With None

The three retrogrades overlap in a regular pattern. Pluto turns first, in May; Neptune follows in July; Uranus comes last, in September. So all three are retrograde together from Uranus’s station until Pluto turns direct: in 2026 that stretch ran from 10 September 2026 until 16 October 2026, and it will come round again from 15 September 2027 until 18 October 2027 and from 19 September 2028 until 19 October 2028. The opposite stretch, with none of them retrograde, runs from Uranus’s direct station until Pluto’s retrograde one: 4 February until 6 May in 2026, 8 February until 8 May in 2027 and 13 February until 9 May in 2028. Both stretches shorten from year to year, from 36 days to 30 with all three and from 91 to 86 with none, because Uranus’s station dates slide later each year by more days than Pluto’s do. (The table counts a day as retrograde from the station date up to the day before the next station, so each of its stretches ends the day before the station date named here.)

No Sign Change Inside These Retrogrades

In neither zodiac does any of the three change sign during a retrograde that begins in 2026, 2027 or 2028. In the Lahiri zodiac all ten loops in the table stay in one sign per planet: Uranus in Taurus, Neptune in Pisces and Pluto in Capricorn. In the tropical zodiac they stay in Gemini, Aries and Aquarius, and two loops come close to the edge without crossing it: Neptune’s direct station on 13 December 2026 will leave it 1.6° inside tropical Aries, and Uranus’s on 8 February 2027 will leave it 1.7° inside Gemini.

The Uranus loop before those did cross. It began on 6 September 2025 with Uranus only 1.5° into tropical Gemini, less than the 4.0° the loop would cover, and carried it back into Taurus on 8 November 2025. Its direct station came on 4 February 2026, and Uranus re-entered tropical Gemini on 26 April 2026, an entry that holds through every loop in the table. In the Lahiri zodiac the same loop stayed in Taurus throughout. The Uranus, Neptune and Pluto sign dates by birth year page gives the signs of the three for every birth year from 1950 to 2050.

Uranus, Neptune and Pluto Opposition Dates 2026–2028

A planet is at opposition when it stands 180° from the Sun as seen from the Earth, with the Earth between the two. That is the moment the Earth draws level with it in the overtaking described above, so each opposition falls inside a retrograde, and near its middle: 50 to 51 percent of the way from the retrograde station to the direct one in all nine rows. The ayanamsa is subtracted from the planet and from the Sun alike, so the instant is the same in both zodiacs, while the sign is not: every one of them falls in Taurus, Pisces or Capricorn in the Lahiri zodiac and in Gemini, Aries or Aquarius in the tropical one.

Of the 2026 oppositions, Pluto’s came on 27 July 2026 and Neptune’s on 26 September 2026. The next of the three will be Uranus’s, on 26 November 2026, 29 days after publication, with Uranus 18.44 AU, about 2,759 million km, from the Earth; its 2027 opposition follows on 30 November 2027. Uranus and Neptune come slightly closer at each opposition of the three years, while Pluto’s distance grows, from 5,169 to 5,246 million km. The opposition dates for Mars, Jupiter and Saturn page does the same for those three over 2026 to 2028, closest approach included.

What This Page Does Not Give

These are dates and positions only. There is no reading of an outer-planet retrograde for any sign or any person, and no suggestion of what to do or avoid while one runs; a table of stations cannot test such a claim either way. There are no shadow-period dates for these three (the retrograde shadow dates page computes them for the five visible planets only), and nothing about seeing or brightness. In Parashari jyotish the three are not grahas at all, as the Harshal, Varun and Yam page explains, and the classical texts give them no rules, retrograde or otherwise; the vakri grah page covers the retrograde mark for the five grahas that can be vakri.

In Brief

• Retrograde now: Neptune until 13 December 2026, Uranus until 8 February 2027; Pluto direct since 16 October 2026
• 2027 retrogrades begin: Pluto 8 May, Neptune 10 July, Uranus 15 September
• How long: about 151 days for Uranus, 159 for Neptune, 160 for Pluto; the loops recur every 366 to 370 days
• All three at once: 33 days in 2027, from 15 September; none at all for 89 days from 8 February
• Next opposition: Uranus on 26 November 2026, mid-retrograde, the same day in either zodiac
• Signs: no sign change inside any 2026 to 2028 retrograde, in either zodiac