Mercury Retrograde 2026 Dates: We Checked the Top 20 Google Results

What We Found

If you only want the retrograde dates, almost any top result will do: 19 of the 20 pages get every retrograde date they list right, the standard February 26 to March 20, June 29 to July 23 and October 24 to November 13 (correct in UTC and US time). One page starts the second retrograde a day late.

The errors live in the detail around those dates. Shadow periods were off by up to six days. One page gives a station time 30 minutes wrong and a station degree 12 arcminutes wrong. One still carries a paragraph from 2025. And just outside the top 20, one page gets all six dates wrong.

The Correct Dates

Computed with the Swiss Ephemeris. A station is the moment Mercury's apparent motion reverses; the shadow runs from when Mercury first reaches the degree where it will turn direct until it returns to the degree where it turned retrograde.

Near midnight, the date depends on where you are. In eastern Australia four of the six station dates fall a day later: March 21, June 30, July 24 and November 14. That is why two Australian sites in our sample, which print the American dates, are right for the US and a day early at home.

Page by Page

Ranked as Google showed them on 27 September 2026. A date counts as correct if it is right in UTC, in US Eastern or Pacific time, or in the time zone the page itself states.

Just outside the top 20, at 22, astrobien.com lists the 2026 retrogrades as March 25 to April 15, July 18 to August 11 and November 11 to December 1. All six dates are wrong, and on the day we checked, the same page said Mercury was in Scorpio (it was in Libra) and that the next retrograde was 13 days away (it was 27).

Where the Errors Come From

Copied dates, not computed ones. Most pages print the same six dates, which is fine when the source is right. The trouble starts with anything that needs a calculation: shadow boundaries, ingresses and exact times. Those are where our sample's errors concentrate, and they are also what a reader planning around a retrograde most often uses.

Pages updated by hand every year. One error is a paragraph left over from the 2025 retrograde, still written in the present tense. A retrograde page that ranks for years needs its dates regenerated each year, not edited around.

Time zones. Four of the six 2026 stations happen late in the UTC day, so the date changes across the Pacific. A page that does not say which time zone it uses can be a day out for part of its audience, as the two Australian pages in the sample are.

How We Checked

We searched google.com for “mercury retrograde 2026 dates” (US English) on 27 September 2026 and took the first 20 organic results that were articles, skipping forum, social and video results and second pages from the same site. We read each page the same day and recorded every 2026 date, time and degree it gave for Mercury. The reference is the Swiss Ephemeris, geocentric and tropical; stations are found by bisection to the minute. Sidereal (Vedic) pages were judged on dates only, since their degrees use a different zodiac by design.

Pages change. If you run one of these sites and have corrected it, tell us and we will update the table with the date of the fix. The full results are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0: download the CSV.

We hold ourselves to the same check. Every sky date on this site is computed from the ephemeris and tested before it ships, and in September 2026 we retired our own historical events archive after an audit found claims we could not stand behind. How we compute the sky.