Transit Calendar 2026: Every Planet Sign Change Date

A transit forecast is only as useful as its dates. "Jupiter is good for you this year" changes nothing. "Jupiter enters your fifth house on 2 June" is something you can plan around.

This page is the full 2026 gochar calendar: every sign change, for every graha, with the date it happens. All positions are sidereal, calculated with the Swiss Ephemeris using the Lahiri ayanamsa and whole sign houses, which is the standard combination in Indian practice.

Remember that in gochar the houses are counted from your Moon sign, not your Ascendant. A sign change matters to you only once you know which house that sign is from your Chandra Lagna.

The slow planets: the theme of 2026

Four grahas set the tone of a whole year, because they stay in one sign for months or years at a time.

Three things stand out.

Saturn does not change sign in 2026 at all. It spends the entire year in Pisces. For anyone in Sade Sati, that means no relief and no escalation from a sign change: the phase you are in on 1 January is the phase you are in on 31 December. What does change is Saturn's nakshatra. It crosses from Purva Bhadrapada into Uttara Bhadrapada on 21 January, into Revati on 18 May, and back into Uttara Bhadrapada on 10 October when it is retrograde.

Jupiter changes sign twice, which is unusual and makes 2026 a year of three distinct chapters. Gemini until early June, Cancer through the monsoon and autumn, Leo from November.

The nodes shift on 6 December. Rahu moves from Aquarius to Capricorn and Ketu from Leo to Cancer on the same day, as they always do, being exactly opposite one another. If your Moon is in Aquarius or Leo, an eighteen month chapter closes that week. If your Moon is in Capricorn or Cancer, a new one opens.

Full year by year tables for each of these are on the Saturn transit pages, the Jupiter transit pages, and the Rahu and Ketu pages.

Mars in 2026: nine signs, no retrograde

Mars spends roughly six weeks in a sign and marks the windows for disputes, surgery, property matters and hard physical effort. In 2026 it runs forward all year with no retrograde, which makes its calendar unusually clean.

It begins the year in Sagittarius and ends it in Leo. Its next retrograde starts on 11 January 2027, so the last weeks of 2026 are the calm before that.

The Sun in 2026: the twelve sankrantis

The Sun changes sign once a month. Each ingress is a sankranti, and Makara Sankranti in January is the best known of them.

Venus and Mercury: the months that double back

These two are the reason a transit calendar cannot be a simple list. Both retrograde in 2026, and a retrograde planet can leave a sign and come back to it weeks later.

Venus moves forward through the year until early autumn, entering Libra on 3 September. It turns retrograde on 4 October, slips back into Virgo on 6 November, turns direct on 15 November, and re-enters Libra on 23 November. So Virgo gets a second, short Venus visit that most simple calendars miss entirely.

Mercury does the same thing twice. It enters Cancer on 23 June, retreats to Gemini on 8 July, and returns to Cancer on 6 August. Later in the year it sits in Libra from 27 September all the way to 3 December, a long stay caused by its October retrograde.

Mercury retrogrades three times in 2026 and Venus once. The exact station dates are in our 2026 retrograde calendar.

The Moon: the daily layer

The Moon changes sign every two and a quarter days, which works out to about 160 sign changes a year. There is no useful way to print that as a table, which is exactly why daily and weekly horoscope writers need a tool rather than a calendar.

See any date in this calendar on a chart

Reading dates in a table tells you when something happens. Seeing it on a chart tells you what it means for a particular person.

Our Gochar Phal transit tool draws the whole of 2026 as a timeline you can drag. Every sign change in the tables above is a marked point on it, every retrograde stretch is shaded, and the chart underneath updates to the date you land on.

You can open it three ways:

• Plain sky. No birth details. Good for checking a date.
• By Moon sign. Pick your Chandra Lagna and every position is shown as a house counted from your Moon, with Sade Sati and Ashtama Shani flagged automatically.
• By birth chart. Full birth details. Adds your natal positions to the chart and works out transit to natal aspects with their exact dates.

There is a week and month view built for people who write horoscopes, which lists every sign change inside a chosen window and everything that stays put, ready to copy.

Open the 2026 Transit Calendar