When is the next Jupiter retrograde?

Jupiter goes retrograde once every thirteen months, and that is why the date walks through the calendar. It is the only one of the slow planets that changes sign every year, so each period happens in a different sign from the last — the left-hand column is the one that says most here. The times are Brasília time and come from the same ephemeris this site uses to build charts.

Look at the middle column, and at the sign that is missing. December, January, February, March: the starting date moves about a month a year. And between Sagittarius and Aquarius there is no Capricorn at all — the next section explains why a sign, and a whole calendar year, drop off the list from time to time.

Why Jupiter skips a calendar year every twelve

Retrogradation is not the planet walking backwards: it is the Earth overtaking it on the inside, with the apparent motion inverting while that lasts. What decides the frequency is how long the Earth takes to complete one turn more than the other planet.

With Jupiter that meeting takes 399 days, 34 more than the calendar year. The period begins a month later each year, and after twelve turns that delay adds up to a whole year: the start slides from December into January of the following year, and one calendar year ends up with no retrograde beginning at all. Between 1930 and 2025 it happened nine times — 1932, 1944, 1956, 1968 and five more, twelve years apart.

That does not mean there was a year without Jupiter retrograde. In every one of those years it spent months moving backwards; what was missing was the START date, which fell in December of the year before. It is the difference between the sky and the calendar, and it is why the table above has eighteen rows for twenty years.

The contrast with Mars retrograde is the exact opposite: Mars is fast, the Earth takes 25 months to overtake it, and 38 of the 96 years between 1930 and 2025 had not a single day of Mars retrograde. With Jupiter there was no such year — there were 87 periods in 96 years, covering every one of them.

How long Jupiter retrograde lasts

About 120 days, four months. Across those same 87 periods the shortest lasted 117.5 days and the longest 123.6.

That is six days of spread over a hundred and twenty, and that steadiness is what sets Jupiter apart from the inner planets. Mars ranges from 60 to 81 days, a third more spread over a far shorter stretch. The cause is distance: the size of the loop depends on how closely the two bodies pass each other, and the farther away the planet is, the less that distance changes from one meeting to the next.

The stretch redone backwards is steady too: between 9.8 and 10.1 degrees across all 87 periods. That is a third of a sign, always — and it has a practical consequence, because ten degrees is more than the width of many aspects. Jupiter retrograde tends to undo and remake an aspect to your chart three times: on the way out, on the way back and on the way out again.

Jupiter is the border between the fast planets and the slow ones

It goes retrograde like the outer planets and changes sign like the inner ones, and it is the only one of the eight that does both. Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto also turn back every year, but they sit in the same sign for years: their retrograde always falls on the same patch of sky. Jupiter changes sign every thirteen months, so the 2027 period happens in Leo and the 2028 one in Virgo.

In practice this decides how much the phase can describe. A retrograde that always happens in the same sign describes a whole generation and does not tell one year from another — that is the case with Pluto retrograde and from Neptune retrograde. Jupiter's changes subject every year, because it changes sign and house of your chart.

It is also what makes it the easiest of the slow planets to recognise: four months in a new sign, once a year, is a rhythm that fits in the memory of someone living it.

Jupiter's shadow takes up two thirds of the year

The shadow is the stretch of sky the planet covers moving forward before retracing it backwards. It opens on the day it crosses the degree where it will stop going back, and closes on the day it regains the degree where the retrogradation began.

In Jupiter it lasts 285 to 299 days around 120 days of core. Between the end of one shadow and the start of the next, three to four months are left over — and that gap is what makes its shadow useful information rather than a permanent state. In Uranus it lasts the whole year, and nine days are left.

What that means for someone living it: the subject does not arrive on the published date. It shows up about three months earlier, as a bet being placed; it comes back in the middle, to be checked; and it settles on the way out, months later. Whoever looks only at the two dates in the middle thinks the period came out of nowhere.

What actually changes in Jupiter retrograde

In the tradition, Jupiter governs expansion, meaning, belief and what gets larger — in Latin it was the greater benefic, the planet of what grows. What retrogradation does with each of those things is the same thing, and it is recognisable:

• The question changes from “how much more” to “what for”. The growth already under way does not stop; what appears is the question of where it is going. It is the phase in which a person looks at her own project and asks whether she still wants it.
• The new opportunity weighs less than the old one. The invitation arriving from outside loses its shine, and what has been sitting still for a year starts to look possible again. It is not luck that is missing: it is that the material of the phase is what already exists.
• Belief gets checked. What you believe about how the world works — about merit, about generosity, about what comes back to you — meets a case that does not fit. That is the uncomfortable part and the most usable one.
• Excess sends the bill. Jupiter enlarges what it touches, and turned inward it enlarges what was already too much: the big promise nobody asked for, the spending that seemed to fit, the “yes” given out of enthusiasm. The bill arrives in the phase, and not as punishment — as a sum.

And the limit deserves saying out loud: astrology does not predict gaining or losing money, does not diagnose anyone and does not decide for anyone. These are tendencies, and a tendency is something you work with.

What the phase asks for, and what is not worth postponing

There is no prohibition, and the arithmetic shows why: if you are 40, you have already lived through about twelve years of Jupiter retrograde. Plenty of the good things in your life began inside one of them.

What pays off: picking up what was left half done, studying again what you learned halfway, revising a partnership agreement, reopening a conversation that stopped out of pride. The phase favours those who go back, not those who start from zero.

What yields less: betting big on what arrived ready-made from outside. Not because it will go wrong — because the enthusiasm of this phase is less reliable than usual, and the bill for a big “yes” shows up later.

What is not worth postponing: an enrolment, a legal deadline, a course of treatment, a signature with a date on it. None of those gets better for waiting four months — and with Jupiter the free window is short: eight months of direct motion are left, and the shadow eats three of them.

Jupiter retrograde in your chart is another matter

Being born in one of those periods is not living a transit: it is a fixed trait. And it happens to 29.9% of people — almost one in three.

People with Jupiter retrograde in the chart tend to have a relationship of their own with confidence. Recognition from outside convinces little and is slow to land; faith in herself is built slowly, on her own, and once it lands it does not leave. It is not a lack of Jupiter — it is Jupiter turned inward, which sometimes looks like modesty and almost never is.

The house it fell in says in which area of life this happens, and it depends on the hour and the city of birth. The article that describes natal retrogradation for every planet, with the proportions for each one, is what a retrograde planet is. And if you want to read your own Jupiter by sign and by house, the series begins at Jupiter in Aries.

Frequently asked questions about Jupiter retrograde