Venus Retrograde 2026 Repeats 2018, 2010 and 2002: Measuring the 8-Year Cycle Over 101 Years

Read your full birth chart — free →

Venus is retrograde now, from early October to mid-November 2026, and it began that retrograde in Scorpio. If that sounds familiar, it should: Venus did almost exactly the same thing in 2018, in 2010 and in 2002. Venus retrogrades repeat on an eight-year cycle, and we measured how tight that cycle is.

Using the same planetary-position engine behind our birth charts, we found every Venus retrograde from 1950 to 2050.

64 retrogrades, each about six weeks

Venus turned retrograde 64 times in those 101 years, roughly once every 19 months. Every one lasted between 40 and 44 days. That regularity is part of why Venus retrogrades are easy to predict decades ahead.

The same autumn, every eight years

Here is the run of October retrogrades that the 2026 one belongs to:

Each return lands a couple of days earlier in the calendar and about 2.4 degrees earlier in the zodiac. Across all 64 retrogrades, the shift from one to the same point eight years later stayed between 2.2 and 2.6 degrees. Five Venus retrogrades fit into almost exactly eight years, and the small leftover is what makes the cycle creep backward.

Because of that creep, this Scorpio series is about to slip into Libra. In 2026 it starts at about 8 degrees of Scorpio; by 2050 it starts at under 1 degree, right at the border. The return after that, in 2058, would be the first in this series to begin in Libra.

Two signs Venus never started a retrograde in

Since five retrogrades repeat every eight years, Venus only ever begins its retrogrades in a handful of places at any one time. From 1950 to 2050 the starts fell in ten signs. Libra and Pisces never hosted a single Venus retrograde start, even though Venus often moves backward into Libra after starting in Scorpio, as it does this year.

What the numbers do and don't tell you

These are positions in the sky, an observable astronomical rhythm. Many astrologers read an eight-year Venus return as a time when relationship themes from eight years earlier come back around. That is an interpretation, and these numbers cannot prove or disprove it. What they do show is that if you remember autumn 2018, the sky is in nearly the same arrangement now.

How we counted: daily check at noon (UTC), 1 January 1950 – 31 December 2050; a retrograde starts on the first day Venus's apparent longitude decreases and ends on the last such day. The engine uses public low-precision orbital elements, so start and end dates can differ by about a day from high-precision almanacs (hence the two-day ranges for 2026).

• Venus retrograde 2026: the actual dates
• Mercury and Venus retrograde at the same time: how rare is it?
• Your full birth chart, free — see where Venus sits in your own chart