When is the next Uranus retrograde?

Uranus goes retrograde once a year, almost always at the same time of year. It is the feature that sets it apart from the others: the starting date slips only five days a year, so it stays tied to one season for decades. The times are Brasília time and come from the same ephemeris this site uses to build charts.

Six rows in a row with the same sign, and the dates nearly identical. It is the portrait of what Uranus is: a planet that spends seven years in each sign and comes back every year to the same patch of sky. If you are looking for what changes from one year to the next, this is not where it is.

Why the Uranus date barely moves through the calendar

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.

Uranus takes 84 years to go once round the zodiac — it travels so slowly that the Earth overtakes it on almost the same day every year. The meeting repeats every 370 days, only five more than the calendar year, and that is why the date slips five days a year instead of the thirty of Jupiter retrograde.

In practice it means that, for your whole life, Uranus retrograde will be a matter of the same season. Someone born with it turning back in September will watch that date walk slowly towards October, and take twenty years to get there.

How long it lasts, and how much it redoes

About 152 days, five months. Across the 94 periods between 1930 and 2025 the shortest lasted 149.1 days and the longest 154.3 — five days of spread over a hundred and fifty.

And the stretch redone backwards is only 3.9 to 4.2 degrees. That number is the most interesting one on this page. Uranus spends five months undoing four degrees — a little over a tenth of a sign, and less than the orb of an eight-degree aspect. It means that when it touches a point of your chart, it is not a touch: it stays there, going back and forth, for close to a year.

It is the opposite of what the word “retrograde” suggests to someone who learned it from Mercury retrograde, where three weeks of back and forth cover twelve degrees. In Uranus the phase is not a retreat: it is an insistence.

Uranus's shadow lasts all year, and that is why it warns of nothing

The shadow is the patch of sky the planet covers moving forward before redoing it backwards. In Mercury it opens two weeks earlier and is a useful warning. Here the arithmetic gives something else.

Uranus's shadow lasts 360 to 365 days, and between one and the next there are four to nine days left over. Measured across the nineteen rows of the table on this page. On more than 355 days of every year, Uranus is inside a shadow.

This is correct arithmetic that serves no warning, and it is worth saying out loud: a mark that covers the whole year tells no day apart from the others. Anyone selling preparation for the Uranus shadow is selling the calendar. What still holds is the position — the degree it stands in, and what in your chart sits at that degree.

What actually changes in Uranus retrograde

In the modern tradition, Uranus governs rupture, independence, invention and what fits in with nobody — it is the planet of the unexpected exit. What retrogradation does with that has a single direction, and it is recognisable:

• The rupture turns inward. Instead of the sudden exit — quitting the job, ending it for good — what shows up is a change of mind about your own life. The person changes inside months before touching anything outside.
• The freedom you asked for gets checked. The arrangement that was set up to give autonomy — the work on your own account, the place to yourself, the diary with nobody giving orders — gets looked at again, and sometimes it is the cage.
• Impatience drops a few points. Uranus direct wants it now; turned inward, it agrees to wait for the right moment. It is one of the few retrogradations that make things easier rather than slower.
• Reflex rebellion shows itself for what it is. Saying no to everything is not freedom — it is the same reflex with the sign flipped. The phase tends to charge that difference to whoever confused the two.

And the limit deserves saying out loud: astrology does not predict accidents, does not predict redundancy, 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 sixteen years of Uranus retrograde. Almost half the brave decisions of your life were taken inside one of those periods.

What pays off: trying the change before making it. Testing the new routine for a month, talking to someone who has already done it, working out the cost. The phase favours those who rehearse.

What yields less: the impulsive cut made to prove that you are free. Not because it will go wrong — because the reason tends to be an old one, and what this phase does best is show that.

What is not worth postponing: a legal deadline, an enrolment, a course of treatment, a signature with a date on it. And here there is one argument more than with the other planets: with five months of retrogradation and 355 days of shadow, waiting for Uranus to “come clean” is waiting for a week that shows up once a year.

Uranus 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 40.7% of people — two in five.

It is a generational trait before it is yours, and that is the part almost no article says. Everyone born in those five months carries the same mark, in the same sign; if it explained personality on its own, there would be a whole cohort of similar people every year. What individualises it is the HOUSE Uranus fell in, and that depends on the hour and the city of birth — the same logic that separates two people with Uranus in Gemini born in the same year.

That said, the mark has content: people with Uranus retrograde tend to keep their independence inside rather than on display. The rupture does not become a scene; it becomes a decision made quietly and announced once it is settled. The article that describes natal retrogradation for every planet, with the proportions for each one, is what a retrograde planet is.

Frequently asked questions about Uranus retrograde