Transits in 2026: three slow planets change sign within 90 days

2026 has a rare property: three of the five slow planets change sign for good, and all three fit inside 90 days. Neptune enters Aries on 26 January, Saturn follows on 14 February, Uranus enters Gemini on 26 April. Below are the exact times from Swiss Ephemeris, the degrees each planet covers during the year, and the full list of retrograde periods. All times are UTC.

Seven sign ingresses

• 26 January, 17:34: Neptune enters Aries
• 14 February, 00:11: Saturn enters Aries
• 26 April, 00:51: Uranus enters Gemini
• 19 June, 21:19: Chiron enters Taurus
• 30 June, 05:52: Jupiter enters Leo
• 27 July, 00:47: the North Node enters Aquarius
• 18 September, 01:52: Chiron returns to Aries

Pluto is absent from that list, and rightly so: it settled into Aquarius on 19 November 2024 and stays there until 2043. Across the whole of 2026 it travels from 2°44' to 5°30' Aquarius, under three degrees in a year.

Why "for good"

Each of the three planets already touched its new sign last year and stepped back. That is ordinary mechanics: a planet enters a sign, stations a few months later, retrogrades back into the previous sign, and returns for good the following year.

By calculation it looks like this. Neptune first entered Aries on 30 March 2025 and went back to Pisces on 22 October. Saturn first entered on 25 May 2025 and returned to Pisces on 1 September. Uranus first entered Gemini on 7 July 2025 and went back to Taurus on 8 November. So all three had their introduction last year, and 2026 opens the long stay: Saturn in Aries until April 2028, Uranus in Gemini until 2033, Neptune in Aries for roughly fourteen years.

Which degrees each planet covers

This is the most practical part of the calculation. A transit does not touch a whole sign at once, only the stretch the planet manages to cross. Here are the 2026 ranges.

• Saturn: 0°01' to 14°44' Aries, ending the year at 8°18'
• Neptune: 0°00' to 4°25' Aries, ending at 1°42'
• Uranus: 0° to 5°41' Gemini, ending at 2°19'
• Jupiter: 15°05' Cancer to 27°01' Leo
• Pluto: 2°44' to 5°30' Aquarius

That tells you who the year touches hardest. Saturn crosses the first fifteen degrees of Aries, so it works on anything sitting in the first half of the cardinal signs: Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn. Neptune and Uranus move far more slowly and reach only the first five degrees of their signs. Jupiter covers almost forty-two degrees in the year, more than all the others combined.

Nine retrograde periods

Station dates from the same calculation, times in UTC.

• Mercury: 26 February to 20 March, 29 June to 23 July, 24 October to 13 November
• Venus: 3 October to 14 November
• Mars: not once all year
• Jupiter: 13 December 2026 to 13 April 2027
• Saturn: 26 July to 10 December
• Uranus: 10 September 2026 to 8 February 2027
• Neptune: 7 July to 12 December
• Pluto: 6 May to 16 October

A year without a single Mars retrograde is not an anomaly, it is the schedule: the cycle runs about 26 months and no station happens to fall inside 2026. The next one begins in January 2027. There is a separate article on that with the calculation.

Look at the second half of the year. From 26 July to 16 October, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto are retrograde at the same time, and from 10 September Uranus joins them. That is no reason to put life on hold, but it is a stretch where slow themes come back for review rather than moving forward.

Four eclipses

The 2026 eclipses fall into two pairs: 17 February with 3 March, and 12 August with 28 August. The main event is the total solar eclipse of 12 August, whose path of totality crosses Iceland and Spain. Exact times, degrees and a per-city visibility calculation are in the eclipse article.

How to tell whether this concerns you

The transit calendar is the same for everyone, but it works through specific degrees in your own chart. A practical way to check:

• Write down the degrees of your planets and chart angles. You need a natal chart built on an exact birth time, because without a time there is no ascendant and no house cusps.
• Compare them with the ranges above. The orb for slow planets is usually taken as up to three degrees, so Saturn in 2026 reaches roughly 18° of the cardinal signs.
• See which house the transit falls into. The sign says how the theme shows up, the house says in which part of life.

If none of these degrees touches anything of yours, the year passes quietly. That is the most common outcome, and it is normal: nobody has every transit working at once.

In short

2026 brings seven sign ingresses, nine retrograde periods and four eclipses. What makes it distinctive is that Neptune, Saturn and Uranus all settle into new signs within the first four months, while Mars does not station once.

Try calculating your chart for free on AstroWay and see whether your planets sit in the first half of the cardinal signs. New and full Moon dates for the year can be checked against the lunar calendar.